Product: The Insider [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 5.0
Courageous
"The Insider" was one of the finest films of last year and certainly the finest film nominated for best picture. What I think it demonstrates to a greater degree that any film in recent years is what courage really is. In the modern world survival is no longer predicated on physical prowess: the willingness to defend or advance physically to maintain ones community or ones principals. We live in a world of laws, language and economics. Survival is all but assured by abiding by or submitting to the status norms and powers that be. Go along and get along.What this film presents are two modern heroes that display MODERN courage in challenging pernicious power structures. They put everything they have at risk for higher principals.It is an epic in the truest sense. Many have complained that it distorted or combined certain facts and characters, but that is in no way irreconcilable with what a film aspires to as opposed to what journalism should aspire to. Crowe and Pacino are demonstrating modern courage in epic theater form---not the precise details of how these men took on a tobacco company and CBS. Regardless, the facts that Brown & Williamson lied to the public and altered it's deadly product to hook it's consumers, and that 60 Minutes balked at presenting the original story for craven financial reasons, is undisputed.Most people today are cowards. They don't get involved and they won't take a stand for principals more important than their personal security.Most people never get to the grass by the water, as Wigand and Bergman do. Fewer still have the courage to press on. They do. They took on those that had lied and killed with impunity. They risked their security for something greater than themselves. They were modern heroes.