|Steve Rybin|
The Insider plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, March 8, through Tuesday, March 10th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Four years separate Michael Mann’s crime drama Heat (1995) and his next movie, The Insider (1999). While Heat’s monumental pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is considered by many to be the highlight of the director’s career, The Insider remains the Mann film I value the most. After seeing it on its initial release, it became one of the key films that made me want to write and teach about cinema for a living. That a movie largely involving people sitting and talking in rooms, in cars, and on the phone could be so thrilling, alive, and expressive struck me, and continues to strike me, as worth studying closely. As the years have passed, each time I revisit and teach The Insider it becomes vividly clear how increasingly relevant its subject matter is (though it has never felt anything less than relevant). The film is based on actual events involving a conscientious whistleblower trying to share his knowledge of corporate malfeasance with the American public, aided by a dedicated journalist who works for a network television corporation. In the more than 25 years since the film’s release, the very notion of “network television” has crumbled, journalism is in disarray, and despite all the communication mediums at our fingertips, public access to accurate and socially productive knowledge is more vexed than ever.
The events The Insider dramatizes occurred in the early-to-mid 1990s. Mann first heard about them through his friend Lowell Bergman, a fellow alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bergman was at the time a journalist and producer for the CBS news program 60 Minutes. Mann and Bergman had been researching and writing a script about an Armenian arms merchant, but Mann quickly realized that the events Bergman was living through at CBS could provide the basis for a compelling film. The Insider tells the story of Jeffrey S. Wigand (Russell Crowe), who when we meet him has been fired from his job as a leading tobacco scientist for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company. Soon he is contacted by Bergman (Pacino), who wants Wigand to help him interpret scientific documents for a news segment he is producing for 60 Minutes. But much as Mann realized that Bergman’s experiences at CBS were a more interesting story than the script about the arms dealer, Bergman too, upon his first interaction with Wigand, realizes that Wigand might be the source of an even bigger scoop. Mann films the initial encounters between Pacino and Crowe in ways that join the journalism film genre to noir, with low-key lighting and threatening offscreen space shaping their tentative first conversations (including the most brooding, ominous use of a fax machine in film history). It’s clear that Wigand has something to say, but he’s afraid to say it.
What Wigand knows, and what he eventually will reveal to Bergman and his 60 Minutes colleague Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), is that Brown & Williamson is spiking their cigarettes with an ammonia compound, and in doing so illegally making their product more addictive. And while he has signed a nondisclosure agreement that is tied to his severance package—“that means you don’t talk,” as one of the tobacco company’s lawyers sternly warns him later in the film during a deposition hearing—his knowledge of something that will affect the health of millions of people transcends corporate obligations. Although certainly courageous, Wigand, as played by Crowe and written by Mann and co-screenwriter Eric Roth, is not a paragon of perfect virtue. Like any interesting protagonist, he’s flawed, a private man with a closet not bereft of skeletons, some of which will become fodder for the tabloid peddlers who will later seek to discredit his scientific knowledge. Bergman will face his own difficulties after Wigand agrees to record an interview with 60 Minutes about Brown & Williamson’s transgressions. But it soon becomes clear that the corporate wing of CBS may not want to air a story that could have grave financial implications for the network (the corporate figures who work for the network are depicted in the same noir-ish, villainous way as the businessmen at the tobacco company, an ominous presaging of the devolution of CBS into a vehicle for right-wing propaganda in our current moment). Now, like Wigand, Bergman finds himself fighting the very institution that had previously enabled his work and livelihood.
Crowe’s performance as scientist Wigand received justifiable raves when the film was first released, earning the actor the first of his three Oscar nominations. It’s a bristly, tightly bound characterization, at times recessive and anxious (Crowe’s nervous fiddling with his large glasses is a recurring gesture), at other times blustery as Wigand asserts his refusal to be pushed around by corporate bullies. Crowe was still a relatively new personality for U.S. audiences at the time; L.A. Confidential, released two years earlier, was his mainstream breakthrough. In The Insider, he trades handsome leading man looks for gray hair and a paunchy, disheveled appearance, which is in keeping with the typical deglamorizing of movie stars in the genre of the Hollywood social problem film. By contrast, in 1999, a decade after he had made something of a mainstream comeback with Sea of Love (1989), it was becoming too easy to take Al Pacino for granted. As Lowell Bergman, he eschews the grand overstatement characteristic of some of his then-recent performances (while Crowe was establishing himself as a leading man in 1997, Pacino was amusingly chewing satanic scenery in The Devil’s Advocate). In The Insider, Pacino dials down the more operatic registers of his performative repertoire to portray Bergman. Pacino plays the journalist as increasingly strategic and stealthy as the film reaches its conclusion, after Bergman realizes he must covertly subvert the attempts of his corporate overlords to squash his Wigand story. Pacino’s work is quietly—and admittedly, during one or two of Bergman’s more passionate outbursts, loudly—compelling throughout The Insider. Given how the accolades bestowed upon Crowe’s work overshadowed his co-star when the film was first released, in The Insider Pacino delivers perhaps the most underrated performance of his career. (The film, as is typical of a Mann movie, is also stuffed with terrific supporting performances, including Plummer as Wallace and Diane Venora as Liane Wigand; two especially notable scene stealers among the many in the cast include the devilish Gina Gershon as a manipulative CBS lawyer and the commanding Bruce McGill as a lawyer who energetically defends Wigand in a stirring deposition scene.)
In addition to being an excellent thriller that perfectly fits in Trylon’s corporate baddies series, The Insider occupies a crucial inflection point in the work of Michael Mann (some of whose other films will be the subject of their own Trylon series next month). The Insider is to date the last movie Mann has filmed entirely on celluloid (although rumors at the moment suggest the forthcoming Heat 2 will find Mann returning to shooting on film). Mann would begin to test the waters with digital video in a handful of shots in his 2001 biopic Ali, before making a series of aesthetically groundbreaking movies between 2004 and 2009 (Collateral, Miami Vice, and Public Enemies, all of which in different ways explore the then-emerging possibilities of digital cinema). Mann’s expressivity and dedication as an artist mirrors the steadfast commitments of his protagonists. Indeed, much like his friend Lowell Bergman, with The Insider, one of the great films of its decade, Mann uses corporate studio resources to produce a work beholden not to corporate values, but to the truth.
Edited by Finn Odum