solid docudrama

Rating: Null/10 (30 April 2000)

Corporate whistle blowing makes for ideal storytelling material, coming fully equipped, as it does, with many of the raw elements of great drama. For who can resist the spectacle of an Everyman underdog, driven by a courageous sense of personal righteousness and love of humanity, laying his integrity, his livelihood, often even his life itself on the line in the pursuit of truth and justice?
Based on real life events, in which "60 Minutes" compromised its journalistic integrity by buckling under to pressure from the tobacco industry not to run an interview with a whistle blower, Michael Mann's "The Insider" provides a solid, often gripping and always interesting drama that works on several levels simultaneously: as an expose of the shocking moral turpitude occurring at the upper levels of many of our nation's corporate structures, as a view of the life-and-death power struggle that takes place in a legal system awash in corruption and mind-boggling complexity, and as an incisive examination of two men's epic struggle with morality and ethics and the exigencies of doing the right thing in a world where doing the wrong is often both easier and more handsomely rewarded.
Russell Crowe stars as former tobacco executive Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, who, upon being fired for no accountable reason by his company, agrees to tape an interview for "60 Minutes" on which he plans to expose the tobacco industry's secret practice of enhancing the nicotine-based addiction levels in cigarettes. Al Pacino plays "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman, who befriends Wigand and talks him into granting the interview. As `60 Minutes' itself succumbs to the pressure of the corporate entity, the film becomes, essentially, a study of TWO whistle blowers, for Bergman, every bit as much as Wigand, must question his commitment to the company he has so long served and admired. While the two cope with their ever increasing moral dilemmas, the real life drama plays itself out, as Mann casts a scathing eye on corporate malevolence, judicial malfeasance, and, above all, journalistic timidity and compromise. Admirably, Mann never takes his focus off the human drama at the core and he is assisted in that by the first rate performances of his two lead actors. It is no wonder that Mike Wallace has denounced the film in no uncertain terms as a libel and a fraud if there is indeed any truth to be found in his depiction herein. Embodied by an unctuous Christopher Plummer, the character hardly qualifies as a pillar of moral courage and rectitude. One of the frustrations in this type of film, anchored in such recent real life events involving contemporary figures of some public standing, is that we, in the audience are not privy to all the facts as they originally played out, and with the proviso offered that not all the events depicted in the film are true blue and factual, we don't always know just what to believe and what not to believe.
In style, Mann employs heavy use of the handheld camera, which effectively creates a sense of journalistic immediacy and truth. One glaring technical error does, however, stand out. At one point, while two men are carrying on a telephone conversation, one in Kentucky and one in Mississippi, we can see clearly that, in one shot it is nightfall and in the other bright day. Unless one of those two states drastically changed time zones, someone in Mr. Mann's film crew obviously fell asleep at the switch.
Although the film cannot always shake off the sense of déjà vu created by its similarity to a number of whistle blower dramas from the past ("Silkwood," "The China Syndrome" etc.), its no-pseudonyms-please topicality gives "The Insider" a power all its own.