Water, Water Everywhere -- Close Cover Before Striking

Rating: 10/10 (23 November 1999)

Michael Mann loves water. In two of his previous films, "Thief" and "Heat", Mann took great care to place his [male] characters in front of deeply calm, deeply blue-green watery horizons at moments of inner turmoil. As the seas calmed them, thus they were renewed for the rest of the picture. James (Thief) Caan goes to the waterfront with his bag of breakfast, breathes deeply. Robert (Heat) DeNiro lives in an architect's dream house of steel and glass with a perpetual thin line of blue sea/sky bisecting the view from his living room.
In "The Insider", which I must admit is a brave, well-made picture, Mann once again places and lights his actors against an aquatic mise-en-scene so precise as to be painterly.
Russell Crowe, in the film's biggest will-he-or-won't-he dramatic moment, faces out onto Pascagoula's Gulf of Mexico. Crowe's body is arranged just so in the frame, the waterline there, the trunk of the palm tree there, a distant sailboat there, none of this an accident. The photographic work is, again, simply stunning. Later, Pacino stomps about in an eerie green foaming Caribbean inlet, the color, and the waves, a sign as to his inner struggles with his own moral weight and the pressures of modern telejournalism.
The supporting cast -- especially Bruce McGill -- and the ambient score are both a strong plus.
"10" from me. Go back. Rent "Thief". Rent "Heat." Go to your nearest body of water. Stand. Breathe. Thank me later.