An Outstanding Achievement for Michael Mann

Rating: Null/10 (14 November 1999)

I've seen the film twice now, and, thanks to the Official Site, I've read the full Vanity Fair article.
There's also a film programme in Toronto which spent half an hour on "The Insider" this afternoon, featuring interviews with Michael Mann and Al Pachino.
I don't think I can say enough good things about this film. It works so well on a number of levels: social conscience, acting, direction, script, music- all are in place to deliver one of the best films of the year.

The programme I cited above had a four-shot of Pachino and Russel Crowe with the real Lowell Bergman and Jeff Wygand. Wow! Crowe reportedly put on 50 pounds for the role. The resemblance to the real Wygand is incredible. Crowe's performance, in fact, is the best thing about the film. He allows the viewer to feel all the emotions the character feels as his life unravels. He is conflicted, motivated by both a desire for revenge and for an idealism which he thought he had lost. He is seeking to redeem himself in his own eyes, and the eyes of others.
Pachino is the idealist, working within an organization which is making increasingly too many compromises to its journalistic integrity. As Bergman, relating to Wygand, both men seem to derive moral sustantence from the other.
And.....the viewer forgets he is wathcing actors playing parts. The actors become those parts as whole cloth.
The film contains a disclaimer that "certain facts have been altered for dramatic effect", or words to that extent. Major reshaping of history would have been the norm with a Hollywood film. Not this one: the Vanity Fair article demontrates that only minor changes have been made to sequence. The spirit of the truth is in place.
I think it is fitting that a film about integrity, about two men of integrity, is in turn directed by a Mann (a bad pun, I know) of integrity.

A must see. Crowe for Best Actor.