# Insider, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    THE INSIDER

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Touchstone Pictures Director: Michael Mann Writer: Eric Roth, Michael Mann, Marie Brenner (article) Cast: Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora, Philip Baker Hall, Lindsay Crouse, Debi Mazar, Stephen Tobolowsky, Colm Feore, Bruce McGill, Gina Gershon, Michael Gambon, Rip Torn

You don't have to see Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" to perceive that no one is more fanatical than a fellow who has just vanquished a bad habit. Find a person who has just given up smoking or alcohol or adultery or a life of crime and you have located a guy who will relentlessly climb the world's soapboxes to insist that you too can become as pristine as a newborn pup. Marie Brenner's investigative article in a "Vanity Fair" magazine article entitled "The Man Who Knew Too Much" portrays such a man, Jeffrey Wigand, an ex-smoker who was a top executive with the tobacco firm of B&W until he had an epiphany. Tobacco is not a nice product, he realized some years after the rest of us knew this, and what's more the executives that make their living from selling this foul substance have noses longer than Pinocchio's. At a congressional hearing one day, all seven CEO's of the big tobacco corporations stated under oath that- -get this--nicotine is not addictive. When B&W's vice president in charge of scientific research heard that, something snapped. Never mind that he was making $300,000 a year, had quite a nice home, a trophy wife and two lovely kids. As a man of science and a man of integrity he had had enough.

"The Insider" is the story of this man and of another who became the most important person in his life. Done in a docu-drama style but with a number of highly melodramatic scenes that give the movie the ambiance of a thriller, Michael Mann's inspiring tale focuses on scientist and whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and on an excitable producer of the famed TV news show, 60 Minutes, Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino). Director Mann ("Heat"), together with Eric Roth, adapted the narrative from an article that appeared in "Vanity Fair" magazine, "The Man Who Knew Too Much," by Marie Brenner. The outrageous lies given to the public by the tobacco industry as delineated in her text are not surprising since, after all, big corporations are not run by the likes of Mother Theresa. The core of the film, however, is not on Wigand and his decision to go public against these prevaricators, but on the sorry actions of CBS. Motivated by greed just play gutlessness, the corporate side of the network AND Mike Wallace himself resolved not to air an interview which would have exposed the tobacco executives for the liars they are.

Director Mann is obviously concerned with a careful development of the principal characters in his story, so that while the movie is swiftly paced with some dramatic slo-mo photography and effective use of hand-held cameras, "The Insider" clocks in as one of the five longest movies of the year. The two hours and thirty-eight minutes are used well. Mann divides the story into two chapters: the first focuses on Jeffrey Wigand, the hero whistleblower, and his struggle with his conscience; the second part concentrates on the goings- on within CBS as first the corporate executives and then Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) himself, turn against producer Bergman and opt to trash the already taped interview with Wigand.

In March 1993 Wigand was fired from his $300,000-a-year job as vice president in charge of research for the B&W tobacco company. He had expressed reservations about the company's policy of using cigarettes as mere delivery devices for nicotine and for the industry's use of chemicals to enhance the addictive power of the nicotine. When Bergman, a producer on the staff of the TV program 60 Minutes, asks Wigand simply to explain some scientific jargon in an industry report, Bergman senses that the chemist knows something about his company that could be explosive material for the popular news show. Since Wigand is contractually bound to reveal nothing lest he lose his severance package and the health insurance he needs so badly (his little girl has asthma), he at first refuses to talk. But convinced that Bergman would not abandon him but would allow him to air his ethical concerns to a worldwide audience, he reluctantly agrees to be interviewed by Mike Wallace and to testify in a Mississippi court despite a restraining order slapped on him by the state of Kentucky.

If you try to wade through Marie Brenner's report in "Vanity Fair," you might well throw up your hands when faced with the complexity of the drama she unfolds. Hers is a piece of investigative journalism that goes overboard in detail, throwing in an enormous cast of characters without sufficient concern for intelligibility and structure. But Mann and Roth, who wrote the screenplay, have shown that film can indeed be not only an acceptable substitute for the printed page in getting across facts but a breath of clarifying air that siphons off the excess verbiage of print text without destroying its truths. Who in the audience--smoker and nonsmoker alike-- can walk away from this film without a deeply felt sympathy for its hero, Jeffrey Wigand? This soft-spoken scientist who gave up his wife, his daughters, his comfortable salary, his spacious home in the service of truth only to be abandoned as well by the TV people who seduced him, has merited his place in the pantheon of American idols. The 35-year-old Russell Crowe, a charismatic New Zealander, is himself somewhat of a hero, having gained fifty pounds for the role and now turns in a more nuanced, more sensitive performance than he rendered in "L.A. Confidential," "The Sum of Us," and "The Crossing." Never raising his voice and yet communicating his agony by his dropped head, his three- day growth of beard, his pained expression, Crowe steals from the show from the more flamboyant Al Pacino who, in his characteristic way, rants and raves throughout the film to communicate his own passions. Who could not feel disgust for Wigand's wife (played by Diane Venora), a woman who, like Mike Wallace himself, abandons the man at the very point that he needs her most? Liane Wigand, living in luxury thanks to her husband's income, loses our sympathy by immediately condemning the man for being fired and is concerned foremost with the future of their mortgage and their car payments.

How extraordinary that Mann is able to tackle the intricacies of the plot--the testimony before Mississippi court, the in-fighting among CBS bigwigs, the domestic dilemma facing Wigand, the congressional testimony of the so-called 7 dwarfs who blatantly thumb their noses at the American public with their lies about the poison they dispense.

We're left hanging in the end, though. If CBS were fearful of a huge lawsuit by tobacco that would threaten a favorable buy-out by the Westinghouse corporation, why do we hear nothing about such an action after the interview was actually scheduled? After all, if the lawsuit did not take place, nothing was at stake in the first place. I would be curious to know as well why Wigand took a job teaching the unusual combination of chemistry and Japanese in a high school rather than in college or a graduate institution. A man with a Ph.D. and a westerner with fluent Japanese would surely be interested in a place of higher learning where, in fact, he would not have to go through the bureaucracy of state licensing required for teaching in the lower grades. I'd be curious as well to know the proportion of heavy smokers who attend the film. Can they sympathize with the right people while at the same time continuing to puff away? (By the way, this is one of the few movies I've seen in which no one smokes.) If so, are they even angrier than the abstainers with the tobacco people for getting them hooked, probably when they were under the age of valid consent?

    Rated R.  Running Time: 155 minutes.  (C) 1999
    Harvey Karten

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