Product: The Insider [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 4.0
What's Wrong With This Picture?
For the most part this movie is superbly acted and well filmed. Russell Crowe, one of the best things that ever happened to Australia, is perfectly cast as Jeffrey Wigand, the scientist whistle-blower who is fired from Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company. Christopher Plummer actually resembles the character he plays, Mike Wallace of CBS Sixty Minutes. Al Pacino should tone down his shouting performance a notch or two, however. The movie got all kinds of nominations for Oscar awards when it was released.So what's wrong with this picture? The same thing that's wrong with another Russell Crowe movie "A Beautiful Mind" and Oliver Stone's earlier movie about the Kennedy assassination. They are all--what an awful word--"docudramas." The viewer is told as the credits go up at the end of this movie that some things have been fictionalized for the "sake of drama." This is a cruel irony since the movie is all about integrity. Surely the "real" story of the cruel joke tobacco companies have played on an unwitting public for years would have been enough to intrigue an audience and sustain a hard-hitting documentary.The movie is so well-done. I just wish I knew what is real and what isn't here--if we only had a fire wall between fiction and investigative journalism/movies in this country-- surely we are sophisticated enough to handle such a division.