THE INSIDER
Starring Al Pacino, Russell Crowe and Christopher Plummer. Directed by Michael Mann. Screenplay by Michael Mann and Eric Roth. Running time: 160 minutes. Rating: R. At the Kips Bay, the Union Square, the Lincoln Square, others.
‘THE Insider” is a beautifully shot, well-acted movie that manages to make a complicated, real-life story without much drama feel like a thriller. But it’s also far too long, and overflows with a sense of its own importance.
It’s about tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and CBS producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), who fought to broadcast an interview with Wigand on “60 Minutes” despite the opposition of network brass.
The script stays fairly close to the true story, distorting things mainly to make Bergman’s – and Pacino’s – role more important. But the film works less as a parable about evil tobacco pushers or the subversion of press freedom by corporate ownership than as a double tale of betrayal – and counter-betrayal – in the ruthless modern workplace.
Wigand is a well-paid scientist at Brown & Williamson when he’s fired for what the company calls “poor communications skills” and what he later says is his opposition to the use of carcinogens to boost the nicotine fix in cigarettes.
At this point, Wigand has no intention of spilling any beans about the company. He’s become a schooteacher, has a generous severance package (and a daughter with severe asthma) and has signed a confidentiality agreement.
But by pure chance, Wigand is suggested to Bergman as a consultant on a tobacco story. After he secretly meets with Bergman, the company forces Wigand to sign a much wider confidentiality agreement.
Furious, he agrees to tell Bergman about his work for Brown & Williamson. To get past the confidentiality agreements, Bergman persuades Wigand to testify in a lawsuit filed against the company by the Mississippi attorney general’s office. That means defying a Kentucky restraining order and becoming an open enemy of his former employer.
Wigand then receives an e-mailed death threat and a bullet in his mailbox. The local FBI agents seem to be somehow corrupted by the company, so Bergman arranges ’round-the-clock bodyguards for the Wigand family. Mrs. Wigand (Diane Venora), a spoiled Southern housewife, can’t take the pressure and leaves her husband, taking their daughters with her.
Just when things seem as if they cannot get any worse for Wigand, Bergman is told by the CBS suits that the network must not run the interview with him. Both anchor Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), with whom Bergman has worked for years, and producer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall), agree with the corporate muckety-mucks.
Michael Mann (“Last of the Mohicans” “Manhunter” and “Heat”) is a superb stylist. But there’s something showoffy and desperate about the way he uses dramatic compositions and the film’s terrific soundtrack to pump up the tension.
Russell Crowe (“L.A. Confidential”) is magnificent as the stolid, volatile Wigand – an Oscar-winning performance. And Al Pacino is much less over-the-top than usual: The ranting, roaring persona he adopted in “Scent of a Woman” seems finally to have worn off.
British actor Michael Gambon pulls off an OK Southern accent as ruthless B&W CEO Thomas Sandefur, and character actor Bruce McGill has one terrific courtroom scene. But it’s the great Plummer (“Sound of Music,” “Star Trek V”) who steals the movie with his brilliant, devastating impersonation of Mike Wallace.
“The Insider” is clearly supposed to be an “All the President’s Men” for our time, but, unless you’re a media insider yourself, there just isn’t enough at stake here. It’s not as if the fate of the republic depends on the public being told the news that cigarettes are dangerous, and that cigarette companies can be ruthless and dishonest.
