I was prepared to be blown away by The Insider, which has been getting rave reviews, but instead, for the first two hours, at least, I found myself comparing it to spinach: it's good for you, but it don't exactly make your taste buds dance the hokey-pokey. These first two hours deal with whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) as he wrestles with the decision of whether or not to tell 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) what he knows about what Brown & Williamson know about making nicotine addictive. Crowe is absolutely convincing in this role, but everyone around him seems lifeless. The film is remote and uninvolving -- worse, unentertaining.
But, as we all know, if you eat your spinach, you get dessert. And dessert comes in the form of the last half-hour, as Bergman battles the CBS executives to get Wigand's inflammatory -- and litigable -- interview on the air. Pacino has pissed me off since Scent of a Woman, but he's actually good here; he finally takes it down a notch and tries some acting instead of bellowing. This segment is Crowe's finest moment, too, as Wigand assesses what he's sacrificed for an interview that seems unlikely to ever see the light of day -- his body language alone is heart-wrenching. This is what the rest of the movie should have been.
Is the paltry dessert worth the mountain of spinach? Well, it depends how tolerant you are of director Michael Mann's propensity for style over substance. The camerawork is highly irritating, with shaky hand-held shots, way-too-close-ups, many inexplicable shots of hands and feet and elbows and the backs of people's heads (he probably thought he was being innovative because no one else shoots the back of actors' heads, but you know, there's a reason why no one else does that). The dialogue is obvious and inelegant; Crowe in particular is saddled with phrases that make him sound like one of David Mamet's toughs. Besides Pacino and Crowe, the only other actor who makes an impression is Christopher Plummer doing a terrific imitation of Mike Wallace. Not that the rest of the cast is bad -- they just don't register.
Just an interesting final note: I read in Entertainment Weekly today that Wigand had only two requests when the filmmakers asked for his input: one involved protecting his daughters' identities -- but the other was that no one in the movie be seen smoking.
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