Very good drama, fine performances

Rating: 7/10 (10 November 1999)

I thought the movie made very good drama out of a story that might of otherwise been rather dull (I am not a follower of the smoking industry scandal). Fine performances all around, but particularly by Russell Crowe. I would only dispute some of the directional choices with respect to what I would say was dramatic effect over charaterization.
For example, the extreme closeups and the soundtrack (much as I enjoy that kind of music) often made me wonder when someone was about to get shot; impending danger, yes, impending extreme violence, a slight overstatement, no? Additionally, I think a few corners had been cut in the characterizations of some of the important supporting roles such as Liane Wigand, and Mike Wallace. I felt the former's exit from the marriage seemed premature relative to immediate context of the narrative; similarly, Wallace's decision to side with CBS Corporate seemed to come out of left field. I believe in both cases the story could have foreshadowed a little better the capacity for the characters to eventually make the decisions that they did (the restaurant meeting scene wasn't enough to me). Instead, we saw extensive footage given to the opening Iranian sequences, the Unibomber sequences, though plotwise their relation to rest of the story was rather inconsequential.
Moreover, I felt that the film towards the end dropped the development of who I thought was the protagonist, Wigand, to concentrate solely on Lowell Bergman's heroism. I think I would have like to see more of Wigand as 'survivor'.
These points downgraded the film's quality for me, though on the whole, very good!