Well-Made But Heavy-Going Expose Drama On The Tobacco Industry

Rating: 5/10 (18 June 2005)

A recently fired scientific adviser at a major US tobacco firm is approached by a CBS News journalist to help translate a safety report on fire risks from smoking. The adviser agrees to help but the journalist discovers he has much more sinister secrets to spill on studies into nicotine addiction and tobacco company policy. Inevitably, events spiral into a legal maelstrom of gagging orders, lawsuits and threatened libel action until ultimately both men start to doubt if what they are doing has any moral validity.
This is a big film on a big subject and it's well made, but ultimately it's frustrating because it loses the thread of an important drama (the appalling depths the big tobacco firms will sink to in order to sell more of their addictive drugs and to cover up the evidence they are doing so) in favour of a much less interesting one (the reluctance of conservative media institutions to publish tough stories in the face of legal prosecution). It's also a little hard to judge because it's based on real events and people but it's also a Michael Mann film and therefore takes place in his highly stylised universe (the Crowe character is constantly worrying about money but always seems to be living in palatial accommodation). It also has some odd casting - Pacino and Plummer (as top US newsman Mike Wallace) are both very good, but Crowe is much too young, Venora and Crouse are wasted in decorative wife roles, and Gambon is just plain daft as a big US executive. In striving for realism, Mann loses his great gift for style and artistic excess, but the film is still fascinating and full of great moments, like the courtroom scene where McGill and Hauser chew each other out. In the end however, I would have preferred a shorter, fictional thriller about what might be happening in tobacco's sinister corridors of power than a rather stodgy drama about journalistic integrity. Hey, guess what - nobody smokes in this movie !!