Captivating; enrapturing and enthralling legal thriller, with which the superlatives just about run out as some terrifying dramatisations take centre stage.

Rating: 9/10 (9 February 2011)

Michael Mann's The Insider is perhaps one of the most accomplished thrillers I've ever seen, a nigh on two and a half hour battle through turmoil; plight; anguish and terror so as to show up those evil enough to do what they do. The film, one of the very best of not only its respective year but the decade of the 1990s, is a thrilling; alarming and intuitive legal thriller based mostly on fact about the proverbial little guy suffering from fraught attacks of the conscience where those in the past have blazed through unabashed before eventually going on a campaign with the view to triumph over megalomania. In all of its runtime, there is barely a dull nor uninteresting moment; Mann effectively going on to tell two tales of hard-edged and immense confrontation that is never anything less that wholly fascinating as it juggles character with narrative with a real sense of filmmaking.
One of the two chief protagonists is Al Pacino's Lowell Bergman, a journalist more specifically tied to a television news production named "60 minutes"; our first sight of this man highlighting his unwavering ability to deal with what seems a rather hair raising situation when he occupies a small room, blindfolded, and manages to swing an interview with a stiff and uneasily moved Lebanon based Sheikh. Once a worker for a publication entitled 'Ramparts Magazine', the inferring that he has come a long way in his chosen field feels prominent. As things unfold, he'll go on to become more deeply involved in the affairs of Russell Crowe's Jeffrey Wigand; a recently fired tobacco company executive whom drives home to distorted editing and cold blue hues as the reaction to being let go settles on his mind. The few fleeting moments we see of the man at his office has him observe the staff party going on next door as he packs away his things alone, the sense of him being an outsider; disconnected or disenchanted with those of whom he works prominent - nobody is seeing him off, and this disconnection or alienation to his workplace or company comes to feature prominently later on. His wife is Liane (Venora), one of his two young daughters is Barbara (Eisenberg) whom suffers from asthma.
Their coming together is through a series of crude and unspecific faxes they send to each another, Bergman's receiving of numerous tobacco company documents sees him contact Wignard for specificities on the subject. One thing leads to another and his ex-tobacco company, representative of Michal Gambon's cold and methodical in tone but large and imposing and authoritative in figure, megalomaniac calls him in to reach some sort of confidentiality deal. Crowe's character is seated in-front of his former boss as another employee looms anonymously as well as ominously behind Crowe whilst cut off at the shoulders; the deal he's called in for breaking down and causing all manner of antagonism and conflict. The resulting threats cause them to revoke his medical related compensation after being fired, meaning they are effectively targeting doing young Barbara harm and are therefore even more efficient as the villains of the piece.
Mann's film is a documenting of the plump, bleary-eyed and somewhat weedy looking Wignard going up against this company with the keen and effectual Bergman. On most of the occasions Crowe's character occupies the screen, he's shot in an unflattering manner; his ambling and stumbling frame not particularly complimenting his overall build and going hand-in-hand with the relatively concurrent close ups of his facial features that dominate the frame: his expression rendered desperate and this working particularly well during the instances in which Wignard is on the telephone so as to capture this grossly unflattering look. The interplay is illuminating, the observing of this man in Wignard just having his life crumble in-front of him born out of the threats his ex-company implant onto him and the paranoia he carries that Bergman is merely in it for himself as a journalistic coup is morbidly fascinating.
Mann balances each of the respective plights ingeniously; where he has his audience sympathise with Crowe, he has them associate themselves with Pacino as this outsider to both the story and the finer details of the case. Where it's established the tobacco company are evil, sinful, grotesquely amoral, loathsome and downright putrid in their actions anyway, Mann has them simultaneously deny nicotine as a suspiciously addictive material as well as demean the war dead when a small but revealing little moment sees Wignard's vehicle pause beside a Second World War memorial graveyard as Wignard sits in the foreground while the man travels to speak openly about things his ex-employers would prefer aren't revealed: the exercising of one's freedom of speech over which those in the graveyard we have resonating in the background essentially died for, and the same freedom of speech the imperialist mega-corporation essentially wish to suppress or take away, feeling prominent. Mann's The Insider is a quite brilliant dramatisation of some eerily true-to-life events, one of the best legal thrillers of recent times and a powerhouse of the filmmaking hallmarks in editing; direction; acting and cinematography combining to form something quite special.