Deep-going account of people under extreme pressure

Rating: Null/10 (25 February 2000)

I wasn't sure what to expect when I was going to see the Insider. I thought it was going to be a good entertaining action-thriller like Heat or Absolute Power, but wrong I was. The Insider proved me wrong about one thing, Michael Mann. Having made so many movies about bad guys getting shot, and sweaty cops screaming at each other, he underlines the facts that made his other movies so good, in the Insider. It's much more difficult than you'd think, and it presents Mann as a professional and experienced movie director, who finally gets a shot at what he really wants to do.
The Insider was entirely about people. There weren't any high-budget action sequences to boost the entertainment value. To make it even less commercial, it was filmed with handheld camera, and it didn't even try to look good, but to describe in detail the lives of the people involved. First I was uncomfortable with the filming style, but I soon realised why it was necessary. There was a certain realistic flair to it that made it even more touching, and it made the viewer either focus on the characters and the plot, or get bored.
The plot was very complex and it would have been very hard to follow if Mann wasn't such a good director. He has a firm grip of the cast, and doesn't let anyone overdo their performances. The dialogue isn't the hip, smart-ass kind you find in a lot of movies, but realistic and free of well thought out one-liners. They actually talk like real people do, and the humour is very low-key. The actors are in on it too, and no-one does more than his own part. The overall style is semi-documentary, touching th viewer on a deeper level, because these are real people.
The special thing about this movie is the way it depicts people. Usually in this kind of genre, the people are just tools used to get the plot moving, and machine guns and cars are the real protagonists. Michael Mann always portrays the people in bigger detail, and shows how the events affect them. In the Insider he throws away all the commercial gloss that remained in Heat (not much, though), and makes the ultimate Michael Mann-film, a humanistic thriller-drama at it's purest.
Besides the stuff above, Mann also delivers some intelligent media criticism, showing how capitalist executives can smother the truth and deceive the public in the name of the dollar. Great movie, but don't leave your brain in the coathanger when you see this one.