The Insider (1999)

Director: Michael Mann                                         Writer: Eric Roth & Michael Mann
Film Score: Pieter Bourke & Lisa Gerrard               Cinematography: Dante Spinotti
Starring: Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Christopher Plumer and Diane Venora

The Insider is a film that mystifies me. Though, in retrospect I can see why, and I’ll try to explain it. First, let me just say, the only thing to recommend in this film at all is Al Pacino. He’s great, and I enjoyed his performance tremendously. How then, could he have been completely overlooked at awards time and snubbed by the Oscars, and at the same time could Russell Crowe, whose performance was bizarre at best, get nominated for best actor? Critic David Denby said his Jeffrey Wigand was “the last genuine protagonist in a big movie . . .” and yet Wigand's role, to me at least, hardly seems to qualify. Whether or not he’ll tell is almost anticlimactic. The real conflict in the film is with CBS and Pacino.

The story, based on an article by Marie Brenner, is about big tobacco insider Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist who worked on chemical manipulation of tobacco to make the nicotine more readily absorbed into the blood stream. The conflict is over his interview with Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes, and how CBS caved in to pressure from the tobacco company who threatened lawsuits and possible takeover of the company, and left Wigand hanging out to dry in the process. I remember seeing the original 60 Minutes piece at the time, and even then there was an element of “so what?” Everyone knew what the tobacco companies were doing, so it was no secret. The fact that finally someone from inside was finally talking was confirmation, but hardly a revelation.

Having recently re-watched Michael Mann’s Manhunter and having been profoundly disappointed--more of which I’ll write about later--I can see his hand all over this film. Wigand is simply an unstable version of Will Graham, and Crowe’s performance suffers mightily because of how reminiscent his role is to John Nash in A Beautiful Mind--we half-expect Al Pacino to be a figment of his imagination. The unfortunate use of Diane Venora is even worse, as apparently all she knows how to do in a film is cry. Christopher Plummer is his usually dependable self, but his Mike Wallace comes off as a waffler, and in the end we’re glad that Pacino’s Lowell Bergman leaves him.

I don’t find anything particularly wrong with Mann and Eric Roth’s script; in fact there are some powerful scenes. One in particular is when Wigand is in Alabama to give a deposition in a case the state is making against big tobacco. Bruce McGill is great as the attorney who shouts down the tobacco lawyer and says what we would all like to say to companies who abuse science in order to lie to us. (For more about that, there’s a great book entitled, Merchants of Doubt that goes into great detail.) But in the end, that’s not enough. The force of the piece is undercut by Crowe’s direction. He comes off as unstable and unlikable, even as his life is falling apart around him for doing the right thing. What we’re left with, then, is Pacino, great as ever, but not enough to carry an entire film . . . not The Insider anyway.