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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
An actionless thriller about a solved mystery somehow emerges as one of the best films of the year.
Nov 5, 1999 | In what's shaping up as a landmark year for American film, "The Insider" nonetheless stands out as an extraordinary accomplishment. It has a marvelous ensemble cast and all the visceral impact and moment-to-moment tension of a fine thriller, together with the distinctive visual style of an art film. But what's most remarkable about "The Insider" is that it appears to build its memorable artifice on a foundation of zero action and painfully pedestrian revelations. At least superficially, this movie tells us that big tobacco companies tell lies and that major media outlets have been corrupted by corporate capitalism. Big fat duh.
In fact, director Michael Mann -- an epochal '80s cultural figure as the creator of "Miami Vice," who has been almost invisible in this decade -- is after something much richer and stranger than the plot of "The Insider" would suggest. And though the film certainly has its flaws, and at more than two and a half hours will test viewers' patience, he mostly achieves it.
Among news junkies and media insiders, "The Insider" has sparked furious gossip over its portrayal of the inner workings of CBS News and "60 Minutes," especially the relationship between host Mike Wallace (played here by Christopher Plummer) and his longtime producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino). Although Bergman, who acted as a consultant on the film, is depicted as a martyr for the cause of journalistic integrity and Wallace is shown caving in to corporate suits at a key moment, the presentation of their characters and the conflict between them is anything but simplistic.
Like most Pacino characters, Bergman -- a former '60s radical -- is something of a cocksure blusterer, loudly declaiming about justice and honor to cover his own insecurities. Wallace, in Plummer's magnificent portrayal, is an aging patrician with his eyes on his legacy. If he loses his nerve in the internecine conflict over whether to run an explosive interview with tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), it's because he's reluctant to be remembered as the reporter who destroyed his own network.
Despite Pacino's always-enjoyable scenery chewing, Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti are more interested in Crowe, the remarkable Australian actor best known previously for his role as Bud White in "L.A. Confidential." There's no way for us to know how much Mann and co-writer Eric Roth's portrait of Wigand -- a research scientist with a troubled personal history who had just been fired by the tobacco giant Brown & Williamson when Bergman discovered him -- is based on fact and how much on fancy. Either way, Crowe's carefully nuanced, almost opaque performance is the visual and thematic centerpiece of "The Insider." We frequently see Wigand in close-ups so extreme we can make out every mole and pore in his face, yet the results of this scrutiny are ambiguous. At the movie's end, we know little more about Wigand and his motives for revealing the secret techniques that his company used to manipulate nicotine delivery in cigarettes than we did at the beginning.
Mann structures "The Insider" around a masterful series of dreamlike tableaus involving Wigand alone against landscapes suffused with improbable, fluorescent colors. We see him practicing his golf swing at an ominously empty driving range at night, driving past the rows of white headstones at a military cemetery, sitting alone in a hotel room imagining his daughters playing in the backyard. On the most obvious level, these scenes express the character's extreme isolation; he has thrown away his livelihood and lost his marriage, has been bombarded with legal gag orders and anonymous death threats and may be abandoned by the network that coaxed him to talk in the first place. But they also establish "The Insider" as a study in American light and space, a primarily visual ode to the essential strangeness and loneliness of American life.
