What price truth?

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2000)

At what point can knowledge be deemed "too expensive" to reveal, even when it would eventually save thousands of lives? How thin can one's integrity be stretched before you can no longer live with yourself? These are just a sample of the themes explored in Michael Mann's engrossing "The Insider", a parallel examination of former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand's whistleblowing 1996 testimony against corporate giant Brown & Williamson, and "60 Minutes" segment producer Lowell Bergman's struggle to expose Wigand's sobering evidence to the public. The screenplay's structure is intriguing: as we follow Wigand's back-against-the-wall attempt to reclaim a modicum of self-respect after years of looking the other way, he concurrently loses all of the treasures, both meaningful and materialistic, he has accumulated in his career. Comparatively, as Bergman struggles to bring to light Wigand's shocking revelations, his once-united front of journalistic truth crumbles as his "60 Minutes" colleagues cave in to the potentially devastating legal ramifications of revealing to the public information that Wigand is forbidden to share. All of the Mann touches are here: the good (muted wide-screen compositions, unusual soundtrack selections) and not-so-good (too-frequent hand-held shots, overlength, underwritten female roles). In any event, this trenchant true story (despite some dramatic license and composite characters) is well-served, particularly by Crowe (nearly unrecognizable as Wigand) and Pacino (convincing as the relentless Bergman). So focused are these two, whether together on-screen or apart, they are never less than riveting.