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Certainly those in the mood for hard-hitting docudrama about investigative journalism and its ethical tradeoffs, combining elements of "All the President's Men" and "The Year of Living Dangerously," will also get their fix from "The Insider." As usual, anyone who actually does work in journalism may be amused to see the laborious news-gathering business made to look so glamorous. Most reporters spend more time leaving never-to-be-returned telephone messages or watching pay-per-view movies in the Ramada Inn than careening through Beirut streets en route to visit a Hezbollah sheik, as Bergman does in the exciting opening scene here. Back in the U.S. after convincing the sheik to go on the air with Wallace, Bergman begins researching a story about smoking and fire safety, which half-accidentally leads him to Wigand.

It's 1995, and the heads of the seven major tobacco companies -- "the Seven Dwarves," as Wigand dubs them -- have recently made their infamous appearance on Capitol Hill to swear that nicotine is not an addictive drug. When it becomes apparent that Wigand has the knowledge and the desire to demonstrate that this was a bald-faced lie, but that he signed a confidentiality agreement with Brown & Williamson, the wheels are set in motion. Spinotti's point-of-view camera trails after Bergman as he ricochets from New York to Kentucky to Mississippi, hoping to get Wigand subpoenaed for a civil trial in order to force his testimony onto the public record. While he battles Brown & Williamson's efforts to intimidate Wigand into silence, Bergman doesn't realize that management back at Black Rock -- the CBS corporate headquarters on West 52nd Street -- is starting to wish the whole story would just go away.

Mann's fine supporting cast includes Philip Baker Hall as "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt, Lindsay Crouse as Bergman's wife, Colm Feore as a Mississippi attorney trying to take down big tobacco and Gina Gershon as the icy corporate witch who lowers the boom on Bergman and Wallace. (As good an actor as Michael Gambon is, he can't do American accents, and his role here as Brown & Williamson's CEO is disastrous.) Gershon is the only woman in the movie who plays any kind of active role in the story, and hers is both tiny and evil. I'm not suggesting that Mann had some obligation to practice affirmative-action casting, especially when telling a story based on actual events, but "The Insider" inadvertently makes clear just how white and male the upper echelons of business and media remain in this country.

We live in a golden age of film technique, but most directors just throw it all up there on the screen and hope it hangs together. Whatever Mann has been doing since making "Heat" in 1995, I wish more filmmakers would do it. "The Insider" isn't just beautiful to watch on an epic scale, it expertly builds tension by integrating an electronic score by Pieter Bourke and Lisa Gerrard and the terrific editing work of William Goldenburg, David Rosenbloom and Paul Rubell. Still, what you'll remember about this movie years from now isn't its whirling imagery or the media buzz but the strange, sad stillness of Crowe as Wigand at its center. I came away believing that the film's title is, in the end, ironic. The Jeffrey Wigand we see here is an ordinary upper-middle-class American who makes an extraordinary decision for reasons he doesn't quite understand and whose consequences he can't imagine. For all his insider information, he remains beyond Mann's grasp or ours, unknowable, an outsider.
salon.com | Nov. 5, 1999

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