Product: The Insider [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 4.0
Through A Cold Inferno
For a fundamentally misleading work, Michael Mann's The Insider is striking, sometimes searing experience. Sitting engulfed in the cold inferno that propels the narrative is never less than compelling. When it came out I was gladdened by the almost universally positive notices it garnered. But I was also left with a sense of unease. The Insider was being praised for all the wrong reasons; as an expose of Big Tobacco, a critique of corporate malfeasance, commentary on the conflict of a profit motivated media. Mann's picture poses as tract on all of the above and emerges an unremarkable pamphlet. That's a shame. Film criticism completes a film, explores it, engages it in a dialectic; only at its lowest level is it a score card to guide the masses to the multiplexes. The dumb approval of Mann's melancholy aria was something like a dismissal.If anything Mann is soft on his primary target, CBS news. American mass media is a grotesque monster; a mechanized beast peddling sellable bigotry because the persistent anxiety that generates grabs more attention and keeps more people "tuned in". It, or rather they, do this with an audacity that somehow never finds inches or air time for simple facts that disrupt the noisy harangues they sell as news. The Insider accepts the sanctimonious blowhards of 60 minutes as people with ideals of integrity who are well outside this culture and are only temporarily compromised by corporate pressure. This is not a "media expose".As for Big Tobacco, well, taking them on in the court of public opinion is not a brave choice (as opposed taking them on legally which, as evinced here, can be quite hazardous). Besides, it is doubtful that the urbane and intense author of Heat and Thief has suddenly decided to dedicate his work to the already effective efforts of the moralistic nanny state, majority alliance for healthful coercion.Once the fog of "issues" is cleared, The Insider becomes the film implied by its individual properties; the metallic cinematography, Lisa Gerrard's longing, desolate vocals on the soundtrack, the intense medium close-ups of the etched expressions of the middle-aged actors. The characters had been alive before the events of the film's narrative, and the accumulated weight of years of anxious compromise are immediately visible in the domestic scenes which blend the voyeuristic familiarity of the popular handheld technique with icy color tones held for long takes. These scenes are punctuated with scant, hesitant dialogue. The camera's intrusiveness finds only silence and loneliness.The film is far more pessimistic than is apparent on its superficial "issue" level. It gets mileage out of the Al Pacino's former radical turned honest professional. But consider the character closely and you'll find that his triumph comes only after he accepts his own helplessness in the larger scheme of things. When he's told that towards the end that he won, he agrees only to add, "What did I win?" It's as if the elaborate machinations of the case, the entire elaborate narrative have been helpfully concealing a great dread that must be faced once those events resolve themselves, be that with success of failure. This dread is even more evident in the Crowe character, whose life, pictured briefly before the media storm at the center of this narrative, is a bourgeois existence drained of joy or purpose. One should not forget that is he who sets these events in motion as a "man of science" who took the money, the car, and the benefits. The fact that he sold out to the tobacco industry rather than a more neutral but equally anonymous corporate colossus is significant, but ultimately secondary.That this is a better film at the character level than at the grand level of political discourse should come as no surprise. The dissection of The Insider binds it to another of Michael Mann's films, 1995's Heat. Indeed the qualities that make The Insider a good film are the same ones that made Heat a great one. The characters in both films are engaged in complex plans to change their quietly painful solitude only to find themselves bound to it, as much by their inability to communicate as by the inert urban wastelands that surrounds them.Transplanting the theme of existential loneliness from a crime picture to a legal one could have intensified audience identification with the characters; instead it allowed some of the empathy to be channeled into worthy abstractions about big tobacco and the press. This is not an argument against the "issue" picture; it's just that Mann's films are that much more powerful when the sum of the parts is not determined beforehand (notice the odd outcome of his Ali biopic where he was tied down by biographical baggage). The picture does arouse great sympathy for the Crowe character caught in a frightening, corporately guided bureaucracy that makes this almost the humane version of Kafka's The Trial. Like Kafka, Mann seems to be, in this age of post-modern artistic cowardice, a modernist looking for a perspective of the urban system he sketches. Unlike Kafka (or Kubrick, who should have filmed Kafka) Mann's is not detached enough to make the grand issue picture. As this fine film demonstrates, and as Heat did so well before it, Mann's urban wasteland retains a humanity that is conspicuous by its absence within the frame. But it is always palpable, threatening to burst into violence.