All The Kings Horses and All The Kings Men Can't put the Watergate Era Back Together Again!

Rating: Null/10 (8 November 1999)

In 1976, Alan Pakula's All The President's Men was released. Those were heady days for journalism. In the period since , the enthusiasm over the Watergate investigation has waned considerably. Then Woodard & Bernstein became stars and millionaires. Today many newsmen are millionaires. People wonder if these guys still share their values. Walter Cronkite is no longer in the anchor chair. Viewers have fled the big Three for Cable. The cable news networks define news coverage for all other national news outlets. Cable News and syndicated tabloid magazine shows give fits to the news divisions at CBS, NBC and ABC, which produce newscasts that are less serious than ever in order to remain competitive. And Americans are about to flee television itself, for the Internet.
Against this backdrop director Michael Mann gives us The Insider, a film every bit the equal in seriousness to All the President's Men. Russell Crowe plays Tobacco Executive Jeffrey Wigand. Al Pacino is Sixty Minutes Producer Lowell Bergman. Wigand has just been fired from his $300,000 a year job. Bergman wants help deciphering a tobacco industry document. The two of them start an uneasy relationship. The film suggests Wigand's employer began spooking his family BEFORE the executive agreed to become a whistleblower for Sixty Minutes. I doubt that is true.
Soon the two men are developing the story. The Mississippi Attorney General's office wants Wigand to testify. Reporter Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) is brought in to interview Wigand. Executive Producer Don Hewit (Anthony Michael Hall) is brought on board. Brown & Williamson gets wind of Wigand's betrayal. Bergman says it wasn't him who tipped B&W. Wigand begins a new job as a high school science teacher. Brown and Williamson assigns detectives to follow him and make trouble for Wigand's family. The Tobacco giant plants anti-Wigand stories in other Press outlets in anticipation of the Sixty Minutes bombshell. Wigand's wife and daughter leave him. He loses his home and the wife divorces him.
The story keeps developing and the pressure builds. But the biggest problem is inside CBS itself. CBS Legal learns that Wigand has a contract with Brown & Williamson that provides for serious financial penalties if Wigand reveals ANY of its secrets, and CBS is liable too. All of a sudden the story is threatening the financial interests of the Network itself. Wallace and Hewitt agree to back off. Bergman is livid. He says CBS owner-CEO Laurence Tisch is betraying the news division because he is afraid a major liability suit will queer plans he has to sell the network to Westinghouse. Left out of the script is the news that the Tisch family owned Loews controls Lorillard, another of the seven giant tobacco companies in America. Even director Michael Mann had to make some concessions. He must have bargained away this embarassing little detail when making his own deal with CBS over what would appear in the script.
Bergman has to tell Wigand the story has been squelched. After all he has had to put up with, Wigand is more than disappointed. Bergman begins leaking CBS' betrayal of the news division to other press outlets. Wallace is now angry that his own part in the coverup has been revealed. He and Bergman quarrel. The Producer is furloughed for a week by Hewitt. But CBS News has a black eye that would make Edward R. Murrow roll over in his grave. Wallace has a brilliant public relations ploy. Lets go over to Black Rock (CBS Corporate) and sell them a package that will save all our reputations. I won't tell you what the deal is though you can probably make a good guess.
The film is two hours and 37 minutes long. It doesn't drag but its a very long sit for a film audience that is mostly under 30 and more interested in special effects than public affairs. In 1976 the film would have been hailed as something like the Second Coming. Today, a film like this is released with almost no fanfare. Its only hope is to capture enough awards to alert the mostly 35 and older audience that has abandoned filmgoing, at least in theatres. Two years ago, Crowe made a boffo debut in a wonderful film called LA Confidential that was soundly trounced at the Awards by the Carnivorous, youth-oriented Titanic. And Crowe, whose performance is tempered in this role, is one of the greatest screen actors to hit these shores since Marlon Brando, James Dean, George C. Scott and Tony Hopkins. Because he still insists on acting at a time when appearing in monster special effects packages is the key to success.., because of this, Crowe's success as a film actor is still not a cinch.
There are other actors in this film that are wasted. Any film that would use Rip Torn as little as this one does, deserves a slap. Torn plays PR man John Scanlon, but he barely speaks a sentence. British actor Michael Gambon plays a high executive at B&W. His screentime is minimal. And Mann repeats a video clip of Gambon repeatedly. The guy who lit a welding torch to reshape the Otter's Uncle's Lincoln in Animal House 21 years ago is wonderful as one of the courtroom lawyers from Mississippi. Wings Hauser, the aptly named and wonderfully over -the-top B-movie actor who usually is larger than Richard Simmons onscreen, is subdued here as a B&W lawyer at a Mississippi court hearing. Speaking of subdued, the most interesting performance is Christopher Plummer's subtle underplaying of Mike Wallace. Plummer's Wallace almost seems to be subordinate to producer Bergman. I wonder if Wallace is really this quiet around his colleagues at the network. The Plummer portrayal is in savage contrast to the Mike Wallace we are used to on-air. Plummer makes no attempt to imitate the on-air Wallace. His delivery is sufficiently newsman-like, but it is not the hard-hitting TV character we are used to. Gina Gershon is sharp and sharklike playing the CBS Lawyer who deflates the team's hopes of putting the story on the air. And former New York Post Editor and columnist Pete Hamil plays a reporter-editor at the New York Times, one of the few Gotham publications he has not worked for.
I wasn't crazy about this film, but in a debased American Cinema, the Insider stands out just because it is directed to an adult sensibility. There are many adults who will not enjoy this film. Its been a long time since Watergate. Not everyone is interested anymore.