Directed by Michael Mann. Written by Eric Roth and Michael Mann
The all too believable corruption, callousness and cowardice on display in The Insider makes you want to light the world on fire.
Its (mostly true) story of a whistleblower’s outmatched fight against the tobacco industry triggers something instinctive in us, because his intention is pure while their persecution of him is anything but. Someone getting destroyed for doing the right thing is tough to stomach and it places an indignant ire right in your bowels, like coal hoisted into the furnace in the engine room of our emotions. Outrage billows out.
Meanwhile, a journalist’s fight to share our whistleblower’s truth encounters a different, but equally upsetting reality, as a dollar bill proves mightier than the pen. The watchdog is a lap dog, after all. Add consternation to your outrage.
There’s a lot of ugly feelings at work in Mann’s movie, yet despair isn’t one of them, as he brings back his usual leading men of deep ability despite their flaws, and for its rather long runtime, The Insider is an icy thriller driven by seething frustration at the state of things.
Russell Crowe is Jeffrey Wigand, recently fired head of research at a major tobacco company. He’s sitting on a secret, but a gilded non-disclosure agreement keeps his lips sealed. He’s got kids and a wife you see, and those severance terms will provide for them. But he’s burning with anger at what he’s seen. Al Pacino is Lowell Bergman, a producer on 60 Minutes, a journalistic institution famed for dogged fact-finding. He wants to tell Wigand’s story, but that proves difficult, and not for the reasons he assumes.
The Insider’s a movie that’s almost two movies. In one of them, you have a whistleblowing loner set upon by the full vindictive force a corporation can wield in the U.S., and in the second, a journalist who, in the pursuit of that loner’s story unearths the rotten core of his own business. There’s a shared frustrated bid for the truth in both cases that unites them, but any attempt to dovetail the nature of their grievances feels tenuous.
It means The Insider wavers a bit during its middle where you’re not sure where it’s driving at. Is it about a concerned citizen’s lonely self-sacrifice in unveiling a tobacco company’s nefarious behavior, or is it about the rotten state of journalism that seems toothless to truly hold power to account?
The narrative structure of Mann’s movie isn’t made of cast iron, but the compelling construction of its parts keep The Insider from sagging. That might be due to the hot anger that runs through both Jeffrey and Lowell as well as you, coursing through your veins and pushing you through the story, hellbent on satisfaction.
Mann, however, with his usual composure, shows it all with a cool detachment that makes relatable, vulnerable men into something bigger, tougher, and impenetrable due to the qualities they possess and stand by. Few can hype up his characters like Mann without it feeling forced, keeping The Insider tethered while the David vs. Goliath confrontation gives everything a sense of the epic.
Pacino brings his trademark intensity and dials it down a smidge to portray a journalist who has the gumption to hold powerful people to account but is also a pragmatist. Pacino certainly knows how to channel anger, and it often spills into erraticism, but there’s a hard focus to it here. He’s great in The Insider, and while Pacino certainly isn’t lacking in appreciation, his work here does feel a little underappreciated in a decade that also includes stellar performances in Heat and Glengarry Glen Ross.
So a sleeper Pacino performance amidst an all-star cast shines in the darkness of an all-too familiar tale of a broken system that also indicts modern media years before its shortcomings became obvious. In the wings, an easy exposé on the villainy of big business, and altogether an ambitious film that lands its punches despite circling around the ring one too many times.
Mikkel Frederiksen 