A story worth telling, a story well told

Rating: 9/10 (8 July 2018)

It will come as no surprise to faithful readers of this column that I like good movies. I also like that even rarer event, the important movie. Rarest of all is that special movie that is both good and important. Michael Mann's The Insider is just such a film.
Mann's best-known efforts to date are the films Heat and Last of the Mohicans. This film demands a more subtle and sophisticated guiding hand and Mann clearly rises to the challenge. The Insider is the somewhat fictionalized, but basically true, story of Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe), a tobacco executive turned whistle blower. It is also the story of Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), a passionate producer who becomes a whistle-blowing insider in his own right.
The subject matter of the film places it in the tradition of films like Silkwood, The China Syndrome, and A Civil Action. When Wigand agrees to go on the record exposing the cover-ups and perjury by tobacco industry executives he is harassed, threatened, betrayed, and abandoned. The real story here though is how CBS was bullied into softening and burying the story. Pacino's performance as the passionate producer with integrity provides the moral center of the film.
It should come as no surprise that this is a good film. In addition to Mann's capable direction, there are some excellent performances by Crowe (who viewers might remember as Bud White in LA Confidential) and Pacino. Christopher Plummer also does superior work in his less than flattering portrayal of Mike Wallace. The screenplay is adapted from a short story by one of the masters of adaptation, Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Horse Whisperer). Cinematographer Dante Spinotti uses color, light, and shadows to infuse the story with rich visual symbols. This is a good film by a team of gifted artists.
But this is also an important film. It would be a mistake to see this film as simply a film about the tobacco industry or the co-optation of the news industry. Ultimately, it is about corporate power in its broadest sense. It was especially interesting watching this film on the weekend of the Microsoft monopoly ruling. The clear message of this film is that we all lose when the bottom line of corporate profits is our only moral compass. We live in a society desperately in need of prophetic critique and moral pronouncement. The Insider does not say all that needs to be said, but it provides a welcome start to a much-needed dialogue.