Michael Mann’s tobacco whistleblower drama is gripping and deeply affecting, led by a difficult, vulnerable Russell Crowe. The women are underwritten and the solemnity occasionally excessive, but we recommend it warmly.
Michael Mann’s The Insider is a gripping film about the difficulty of getting powerful people to answer for what they do. It follows a tobacco whistleblower’s ordeal with a seriousness that is mostly earned, and takes care to make the man more than an exemplary victim. Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand gives the story its most troublesome and affecting presence, while Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman carries its anger at compromise. Mann finds suspense in the work of making an unwelcome truth public.
Crowe is the chief reason it works. He makes Wigand difficult company without giving us permission to dismiss him, and allows vulnerability to show through the awkwardness. We felt anxious watching him in the close-ups, because the strain in his face makes speaking honestly seem exhausting. We want him to be heard, but we also want someone to stop asking him to bear so much. Crowe makes the pressure on this particular man matter throughout the larger dispute.
Dante Spinotti’s cinematography stays close enough to catch that strain, and his attention to everyday objects makes the surrounding world feel uncomfortable too. Brian Morris’s production design benefits from this scrutiny: the familiar surroundings keep corporate intimidation from seeming safely remote from daily life. The close framing works because the actors give us something worth watching; with less complicated performances, this much attention to faces would quickly become oppressive.
Pacino supplies a firmer moral conviction, though Mann occasionally seems too impressed by it. Beside Crowe’s awkwardness, Bergman can look a little too securely in the right. Christopher Plummer, as Mike Wallace, brings welcome resistance to any easy admiration of the media. Eric Roth and Mann’s screenplay is strongest when professional pride complicates the wish to do something decent. Those complications give the actors room to suggest motives that their characters might prefer not to examine.
Editors William Goldenberg, David Rosenbloom and Paul Rubell keep the complications legible across 158 minutes, and for most of that time the film earns its length. They give the pressure on Wigand time to accumulate without letting him disappear beneath the public dispute. Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke’s music contributes to the unease, though it also encourages Mann’s habit of treating nearly every difficulty with grave emphasis. A little less insistence would help in places. We understand the seriousness before the film has finished stressing it.
The writing for the women is a more substantial limitation. Diane Venora’s Liane Wigand receives less of the attention that allows the men to be so difficult and so absorbing. The effects of the struggle beyond work matter to Mann, but the women deserve interests and concerns that do not simply serve the central men. That narrowness is frustrating in a film otherwise so alert to the ways a public dispute can intrude upon a private life.
As a conspiracy thriller, The Insider gets an unusual amount of suspense from the effort of putting information before the public. It trusts us to follow the detail, and the pressure remains personal because Crowe never lets Wigand become merely a representative victim. There is enough patience here to justify putting up with Mann’s occasional heaviness. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and leave something lighter for afterwards.
