Re-watching 'The Insider'

Rating: 8/10 (22 March 2014)

I distinctly remember seeing 'The Insider' for the first time in an old traditional theater on the main city square of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, sometime in early 2000. I'm sure I went back to see it a second time while it was still showing there.
I know I must have seen it several times more since then, because I can remember almost every important line from the movie. But re-watching it now, it still amazes me with its freshness, intensity, and artistry. The camera work and shots are surprising, and really caught my attention this time: the extreme closeups, the contrasts between light and shadow, as well as between the extreme focus and blurry parts of the shots.
'The Insider' was a commercial failure. A flop. It lost at least $30 million for Touchstone Pictures and Disney (the film's distributor and the bigger studio behind Buena Vista Pictures). The film also didn't win any Oscars (it was nominated for 7) but was beat out in every category that year by 'American Beauty' -- by comparison, an inferior, over-hyped picture. And so 'The Insider' -- a movie with a serious grown-up story about a real-life issue with the most serious implications; a story touching on health, business and the news media; a complex film for thinking adults – couldn't attract audiences to the theater, without any shootouts, car chases, or explosions.
It also happens to be Michael Mann's best film, for all the reasons just mentioned. Everyone involved rises to the occasion and is great in this: Bruce McGill, Diane Venora, Michael Gambon, Mister Philip Baker Hall, Gina Gershon, Colm Feore. And the major players have some of the best roles of their careers, playing real-life figures. Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace: smug, vain, and yet crotchety. Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand: an anal, worried, stand-offish but tormented witness, trapped somewhere between his conscience and his comfort; his anger and resentment and the stable family life he once had. And Al Pacino as Lowell Bergman: the driven, self-righteous crusader for the freedom of the press, who has built a career seeing himself as the insatiable hound hunting after the truth -- And damn the consequences! (Best Pacino-as-reporter line: "Everything interests me.")
Watching it now, supposedly from the moral-high-horse perspective of a smug ex-smoker, is also new for me. I started smoking -- like most young idiots -- to look cool. Which was something I learned at least partially from images of smoking I saw in the movies. The media image of smoking on screen seemed to communicate something adult, sophisticated, mysterious, cool – all the things that I wanted to be.... I was a heavy smoker over a period of about 18 years (on and off, quitting for at least 2 of those years). I smoked hundreds of packs, thousands of cigarettes in that time: Marlboro Reds, Gitanes Blondes, Gauloises Bleus, Marlboro 'Lights.' I only quit (this time, hopefully the last time) about a year ago. I am almost 43 years old. Statistically, this means I will probably die of some later medical problem related to those years I spent smoking. Fully 1/2 of smokers now living and smoking will die from smoking-related illnesses. Fifty per cent. Take a coin out of your pocket and flip it. Call it: heads you live, tails you die.
I was smoking away years of my life, deliberately ignoring reality. I think about these things, too, as I re-watch this film.
It's only right that Hollywood tries to even the score a little in this case. It would take another six years before the comedy 'Thank You for Smoking' appeared, in 2005. Two films: that's it. Two movies in the entire one-hundred-year history of cinema. Only two films to question the deadliest drug ever shown on film -- as opposed to the sanitized, idealized, romanticized version shown in thousands of films, over more than a hundred years. Another thing to think about as you watch 'The Insider.'