Genuinely adult entertainment

Rating: Null/10 (8 November 1999)

After an appalling 1999 at the cinema, I at last found a wonderful film to rival and even surpass the wickedly funny Election. "The Insider" has it all: an enthralling true story, a vitally important subject, moral complexity, superb craftsmanship, intelligent writing, excellent and passionate acting, and interesting and morally muddled characters. Even the "heroic" whistleblower is portrayed as a flawed and hesitant person who was quite content to enjoy an enviable lifestyle for years on the basis of his highly paid job at a tobacco giant. He frankly admits that his main motivation for taking the job was money, with the self-deluding hope that he might make a useful contribution to research. As a recent British immigrant, I found it hard to scrape up much sympathy when he was forced to leave his luxury home and was sadly reduced to living in a pleasant suburb and driving a Volvo estate - a pretty high living standard by European yardsticks.
Similarly, Mike Wallace was portrayed as a mixture of political calculation, professional pride and personal vanity. The decision to water down the "60 minutes" expose under legal challenge was shown as shabby and shameful, but not wholly unprincipled.
The only person shown as wholly pure and devoted to revealing the truth was Al Pacino's dedicated producer/investigator. This was a noticeable flaw in the writing; if all the other main players are shown as crooked or morally compromised, why is he spared? But this is to quibble about a detail in a most worthwhile project. My main regret is that so few feature films are dedicated to important factual issues. A cursory glance at any major newspaper reveals dozens of potentially enthralling films which would not only enlighten the audience, but be far more entertaining than most of the fictional drivel I have seen in recent years.