The Insider reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

The Insider

The good news this week, with the opening of Michael Mann’s The Insider, is that there are no guys pounding each other to a pulp, sultry teenagers wearing nothing but rose petals, or a head in a Tupperware® container. But, the bad news is that there are no guys pounding each other to a pulp, sultry teenagers in rose petals, or covered dish supper surprises. To be blunt, at 148-158 minutes (I’ve seen different running times at difference sources), The Insider is two and a half times longer than the Sixty Minutes of the television program that it focuses on and not nearly as interesting.

The film recounts the story (as told in a Vanity Fair article) of Jeffrey Wigland, a recently fired tobacco company executive. His Sixty Minutes interview was censored in 1995 when CBS brass got intimidated by the record of what big tobacco could and would do after Wigland’s life was effectively ruined. So, we’ve got a good story, one that is certainly worth telling, but, at best, in the ninety minutes or so of a made for tv movie (of course, that would never happen).

Instead, director Mann takes a lavish, epic approach to material that just does not hold up. For the first quarter hour or so, he confuses his audience with the story of Mike Wallace’s (Christopher Plummer) Hezbollah interview. This odd beginning establishes the quality and integrity of the CBS news team, but do we really need this, all fifteen minutes or so of this? Any more than we need about a minute of a New York Times newspaper rack later—a profile, at that, not even a front view so that we can read the headlines?

We finally get to America for presentations of the two main characters, whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and Sixty Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino). Wigand has just been fired, and Bergman gets in touch with him as a consultant on another tobacco story. We see both men in fairly long sequences with their families, and yet, there is no connection made with the families, no sense that either man acts out of commitment to save smokers or set a good example for his children.

Wigand’s motivation seems to be not much more than spite or revenge for his firing. Bergman is a fighter looking for a fight, any fight. Crowe and Pacino balance each other admirably. Crowe gained about fifty pounds for this role, and he moves through it with a heavy solidity, almost weighed down, a big man with a lot percolating just below the surface. Pacino, unfortunately, uses the Bergman characterization as an excuse to play Pacino, all swagger and attitude.

For much of its extended time, the film moves between the parallel stories of Bergman and Wigand, with the disintegration of Bergman’s professional relations and the breakdown of Wigand’s marriage. There is some pressure by Wigand’s former employer for him to respect the confidentiality oath that he signed, a threatening e-mail, even a raccoon rooting around in the back yard, but somehow the threats never seem to justify Wigand’s and his wife’s (Diane Venora) paranoid responses.

Mann doesn’t seem interested in telling a story or holding our attention. There are a lot of good, subtle touches, but the problem is that there is just a lot of a lot of stuff. Somehow, Wigand’s story (with Crowe’s superb performance) fades out for the flashier Bergman story and Pacino performance.

There has been some complaining about the way Mann plays around with the facts. Well, this is a movie, all 150 or so minutes of it, not a Sixty Minutes report. But, even as a movie, The Insider does have problems. There is a good story here, there is some clever filmmaking, there are at least two intriguing characters, and with its politically correct topic, there may be a built in Academy Award nomination, but somehow, everything gets lost in too many false starts, too many problems.

I catch myself so often complaining about the length and the wasted time in the films I review that I decided to see if movies really are getting longer. I jotted down my candidates for best suspense film (Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960), best western (John Ford’s Stragecoach, 1939), and best film (Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, 1941). You may not agree with my selections, but Psycho runs 109 minutes, Stagecoach 95 minutes, and Citizen Kane 120 minutes. OK, I’ll give you Casablanca fans equal time, but not really, since the time for Michael Kurtiz’s 1942 masterpiece is only 99 minutes long. Except for Psycho, the new kid on the block at less than forty years of age, these other films have kept people talking and entertained for over half a century. So, to Mann and others, please note.

Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and remember the sad lesson of this film, that perhaps some whistles are not meant to be blown... at least not for two and a half hours!