Product: The Insider [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 3.0
I kept waiting for something to justify the build up.
Full of portentious music and camera angles, The Insider plays like a story that is about to reveal a mystical, transforming truth, or at least something shocking. But that's the problem. The movie isn't about a network news show cow-towing to financial pressures. Sure, that story is here, but it never becomes the major focus of the film. And the movie isn't about one man and his crisis of conscience or character. Again, we are shown the thin, superficial layers of this personal struggle, but not much more. Instead, the movie drills into, and focuses on relentlessly, the "secret" this "insider" wants to tell the world, but can't. And that point is driven home in so many different ways--as if Jeffrey Wygand (who I suppose is the main character) has something extraordinarily interesting and devastating to reveal, and that the world will change as a result of him going public.That's the tragedy of The Insider. Because now, a few years of perspective later, we realize that Wygand's inside story is both obvious and relatively unimportant. Sure, it caused some big tobacco settlements to be struck, but it packs relatively little dramatic punch. And so all this pomp and circumstance about his revelations and their impact on society at large has no legs. And the loud, pretentious soundtrack, the slow motion effects, the bombastic set-up, well, it's a set-up for disappointment. It's a bit like setting your home movies to a Wagnerian opera.I gave the movie a three because I thought Pacino's and Plummer's performances, and to a slightly lesser extent, Crowe's, merited it. Plus, being inside the conflict within CBS was fascinating.