The Insider (1999)

I'm surprised I never saw The Insider, nominated for Best Picture of 1999, before, particularly since a significant portion of the film deals with a famous lawsuit filed by the state of Mississippi. I met the Attorney General of the state, Mike Moore (who plays himself in the movie), several times while I was still a newspaper reporter, and I have to admit that I admired his sense of integrity. He seemed to be a genuinely unaffected person; in fact, the first time I met him was at a gas station, and he was pumping his own gas. How many attorneys general can you say that about these days? He's the one who attacked the tobacco companies in the early 1990s for the Medicare health costs that the state had to pay for those who are addicted to smoking; he and the state won, by the way.

Back to the film, though. The Insider is about the attempts by Big Tobacco to cover up just how addictive cigarettes are, thanks to chemical alterations the companies make in the nicotine itself. Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe) was a corporate officer in charge of research who is fired after confronting his bosses over their misrepresentations to the public. He is asked by a producer for the TV show 60 Minutes (played by Al Pacino) to be a part of a story on a different topic, but Pacino's Lowell Bergman quickly figures out that Wigand has an even bigger story to tell. The rest of the film is about the attempts to get Wigand's story on air, despite attempts by the tobacco companies and even the corporate structure of CBS to stop it.

The acting is all first-rate in this film, and I would call particular attention to Christopher Plummer, who does an astounding job of portraying Mike Wallace with all of this talent and vanity. Crowe and Pacino work exceptionally well together; it's a battle of intensity whenever the two of them appear on screen. I think Crowe may win most of the time, but Pacino certainly is still in the game. At least in this film, he's not doing his usual bombastic Scent of a Woman style of acting.

The film is a bit long, clocking in at almost three hours. There are moments I could see being cut without hurting the trajectory of the plot, such as the whole business at the beginning of the film with Bergman trying to get Wallace an interview with a leader of Hezbollah. I know it's meant to give us a sense of the kind of person that Bergman is, but the rest of the film ably demonstrates that. Still, this is a suspenseful movie, and it takes viewers through one of the more interesting (from my perspective as a former reporter, at least) cases of the clash between journalistic ethics and corporate mentality.