Probably the Best Expose of Comporate Greed Backed by Hollywood

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2008)

Corporate greed is one facet of American life that is hidden often from public scrutiny. Unfortunately, many multi-billion dollar corporations are only interested in profits at the expense of Americans' health and welfare. In short, we the public pay for corporate executives' multi-million-dollar mansions, their planes, and their vacations, and we often do it without realizing what we are compromising in terms of our life. "The Insider", based on the real-life incidents of corporate informer Jeffrey Wigand, is one of the few American films to date that deals truthfully with the lies and corruption of American corporations.
Jeffrey Wigand (played with exceptional emotionalism by Russell Crowe) was fired from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson when he could not condone the company's use of ingredients in their products to perpetuate addiction to nicotine. To add insult to injury, the corporation began threatening Wigand and his family to scare them into honoring a confidentiality agreement that basically compelled him from revealing corporate wrong-doing to the public. The film starts with the day Wigand leaves the offices of Brown and Williamson. He is then approached by Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), then one of the top journalist-producers for 60 Minutes, to analyze some documents from Philip-Morris.
Bergman then discovers that Wigand has a story to tell. Wigand at first declines, using the confidentiality agreement as his reason. The film becomes how and why Wigand eventually agrees to be interviewed on camera, and the many twists and turns that occur in the process. Simultaneously, a class action lawsuit in Mississippi is brewing concerning the seven major tobacco companies, and they compel Wigand to testify there as well. Then in an interesting and unexpected twist, CBS corporate begins to pressure CBS News about withholding the Wigand story. Its reasoning: the CBS corporation was in the midst of a buy-out that would earn millions for top corporate executives that might be compromised if the there was a threat of a lawsuit from Brown and Williamson.
The film is a tour-de-force triumph not only about corporate greed, but also how network corporate executives, and not journalists, are having more and more of a say on what stories are aired and what stories never leave the editing room if the corporation fears that the story is not in their best interests. The film becomes as much about an issue that is now plaguing our entire American democracy as it is about corporate consumer products: the freedom of the press to expose stories that are in the public interest as oppose to corporate interests. As a side note, the late Ed Bradly produced a story for 60 Minutes exposing President Bush's misleading the public about the War in Iraq that has not, at this writing, ever been aired.