Product: The Insider [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 4.0
Modern newsmaking just keeps getting shiftier
Not 10 minutes into Michael Mann's "The Insider," CBS "60 Minutes'" reporter Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) launches into a tirade at the notion that someone might control one of his interviews. His target begins as an Arab gunman protecting his leader, then transforms to everyone in the room. Wallace storms off by himself. The gunman rescinds his demands. And quietly, carefully, the "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) approaches Wallace to see if he's "warmed up.""I've got my heart going now," Wallace says.The scene sets the perfect tone for the "The Insider," an unflinching look at modern journalism. After that, can we look at Wallace straight? When, in another tirade, he accuses a corporate drone of strong-arming him, is he, in fact, strong-arming her? When he cries, are his tears real? And if Mike Wallace is an icon in this business, what does that say about the ethics of everybody else?Mann takes those questions and applies them to the trials of Jeffrey Wiegand (Russell Crowe), a tobacco whistle-blower whose interview with "60 Minutes" was delayed for more than three months because of CBS's fear of lawsuit. Wiegand, under legal pressure from Big Tobacco, loses everything in the process: his wife (Diane Venora), money, reputation, freedom. And CBS hangs him out to dry.The specific details of exactly what Wiegand knew - laid out nicely in the Vanity Fair piece "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - are inconsequential in the movie, for they merely confirm what we've supsected for half a century. More provocative is Mann's two-fold approach that shows Wiegand's downward spiral, and Bergman's fight to keep the interview intact.The film's second half proves it, as "The Insider" shifts to a behind-the-lies look at the CBS decision and Bergman's counteroffensive to get executive producer Don Hewitt (Philip Balker hall) and Wallace back on board. Bergman's crusade is a little simplified - Pacino's performance plays up the "one-man-and-his-mic" fantasy - and yet because Wiegand's livelihood is at stake, we root hard.Mann, a master technician, jams the camera up in everybody's face to create intimacy rare in a movie this big Cinematographer Dante Spinotti has always been superb, and the visuals are crisp and have a full-bodied atmosphere to them.And then there is Russell Crowe, in the role that put him on the A-list. Wiegand, a brash, sometimes compulsive personality, is played body and soul by Crowe as a determined, principled man who refuses to be pushed around."All the President's Men" got most of its thrill in how it utilized the anonymous insider "Deep Throat." This time, we know exactly who Deep Throat is, and how, unlike the 1970s, he doesn't call the shots anymore. That's how much journalism has changed.