The Insider
Alleva, Richard
~ ere's a scenario for you. A patriotic American discovers that a mighty and paranoid superpower is trying to undermine the health of this country, even to the point of turning many of us into...
...In a tale pitring two corporations against each other with only profit at risk, what reader or viewer would care about the outcome...
...The superpower still exists to do mischief in the future but at least it has been stymied...
...The actor perfecfly captures the man's depleted love for his wife but can't explain when or why the marriage went sour...
...And our hero is the "60 Minutes" producer, Lowell Bergman, who first solicits Wigand's apostasy and then rescues his information from limbo when corporation politics (CBS's fear of a lawsuit) leads "60 Minutes" to emasculate Wigand's crucial interview with Mike Wallace...
...Fair to Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt (producer of "60 Minutes"), who have complained that they never capitulated to CBS's fears...
...and William J. Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues, held a press conference...
...On this point I plead ignorance, but I must say that Christopher Plummer, a supreme stage actor who at last has a screen role he can sink his thespian incisors into, makes Wallace a gleaming, magnetic prima donna, one whom the audience never sneers at but comes to regard as a lovable monster, almost a nonlethal version of Hannibal Lechter...
...But our hero finally gets the news out and rescues both the mole and the American people...
...Their aim was to reveal Wigand's part in a scandal, not to plumb the depths of his character...
...Russell Crowe as Wigand isn't just Pacino's equal...
...viewers spurned the show, the logic runs, because it contained not a single sympathetic character with whom they could identify...
...Dragon became the kind of can-do executive who, when pressed for a matinee idol, cheerily kidnapped one from a detox program...
...a bullet is placed in his mailbox...
...America's longstanding love-hate relationship with the film industry has produced a stream of movies and novels, Commonweal 2 0 January 14, 2000...
...To my delight, The Insider brushes my trepidation aside...
...The Institute offers the following deg in Religious: Education, M.A...
...I'm not faulting the writing of Mann and Eric Roth...
...Hot, in this case, meant scandalous...
...Has an actor ever given so much more information than his script...
...Thus, The Insider is tapping into one of the perdurable masochistic pleasures of the traditional spy thriller: We are drenched in a paranoia that may be justified...
...Once the interview is emasculated by CBS and Wigand's life goes into limbo, so does his status as a character, because a character who can no longer affect the central action of a drama is no longer truly dramatic...
...It's a true story that you may already know if you've watched "60 Minutes" in the last few years, and it's now been dramatized and slightly fictionalized in Michael Mann's The Insider...
...But our hero also discovers that there is a weak link in the superpower's central bureaucracy, someone who, out of basic human decency, is willing to be a "mole" and release his employer's plan to the media...
...No, this is not the latest James Bond thriller...
...For example, in a plot twist that skewered the widespread practice of product placement (in which companies buy screen time for their brands), Peter signed on to a tobacco-lobby campaign to sell cigarettes to teen-agers-after all, he needed cash to finance Beverly Hills Gun Club, Dragon Productions' follow-up to its action release Slow Torture...
...But the cultural climate that fostered "South Park," Howard Stern, and the urination poster for the latest Adam Sandler movie turned cold on "Action"--the show landed such low Nielsen ratings that Fox took it off the air during the sweeps month of November, and then, after reviving it for a few weeks in early December, canceled it altogether...
...And when Bergman first approaches Wigand to do a perfectly innocuous technical task for CBS, the scientist's paranoid response alerts the TV producer that this man is a potential mole...
...Just for money...
...The pernicious superpower isn't Russia or China or Iran...
...If Brown & Williamson hadn't been so paranoid about a "man who knew too much," they wouldn't have (reputedly) threatened him...
...he actually tops the excellent work he did in L.A...
...By the movie's conclusion, he has convinced us that this journalist is a man who can know himself only through strenuous action, and that we have had a rare occasion to know him well because we have seen him operate at the top of his form...
...And he worked and hobnobbed with people as despicable as he was...
...Michael Mann's direction holds the wide-ranging story together, giving it the proper measures of panoramic sweep and microscopic intensity, though I wish he had reined in a pretentious musical score that seems to set this entirely American story somewhere in the Middle East...
...Daniel Schorr will get a chuckle out of that one...
...And so Lowell Bergman takes over the movie and, as he calls up newspaper editors to report the shame of CBS's intimidation, the movie takes on his qualities: extroversion, righteous fury, fearlessness...
...This scenario provided "Action's" scriptwriters with ample opportunity to deride the movie business...
...Yet the result frustrated me because, given the story's limits, we can't really know Jeffrey Wigand...
...and what one might term an anti-P.C, aesthetic ("I'm gayer than a leather pifiata...
...What makes this turn of events more intriguing, of course, is the fact that dystopian visions of Hollywood have a distinguished history...
...The show chronicled such exploits in a style that required an on-screen warning label--"The program is recommended for mature viewers...
...Confidential...
...Television professionals have attributed "Action's" failure, in part, to its dystopian vision...
...Wigand, on screen at least, is a man who lives behind a mask of stoicism even when he's quivering inside with rage...
...Eric Roth's writing confidently taps into the boardroom, s w i v e l - c h a i r machismo of executives and celebrity broadcasters as in the moment when Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) states that going through with the Wigand story might force him to "spend my final days wandering in the wilds Institute o[ Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry Director Position Available Boston College invites applications for the position of Director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry...
...Not the least frisson of this always compelling movie is the way it plays on the fears of even those of us willing to give two cheers for capitalism that an American business eliciting money from customers won't hesitate to kill some of those same customers to make a bigger profit...
...Crowe reveals Wigand's pride in his scientific ability, but he can't show why it was wasted on behalf of cigarettes...
...Pu-leeze...
...When John le Carr6, after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, suggested that the industrial espionage novel might succeed the cold-war thriller genre, I thought this could be a hazardous development since it might entail the loss of moral stakes...
...This year, the winners were two new offerings from the impudent Fox network: "Get Real" and "Action," a dark Hollywood spoof that hype had crowned, on the eve of its debut, the hottest show of the season...
...Furthermore, paranoia isn't just an atmospheric side effect here, but the movie's incitement, its wellspring...
...What's interesting aesthetically about The Insider is the way it progresses from dimly lighted, claustrophobic, almost Kafkaesque terror to open-air, furiously paced muckraking drama...
...a character boasted...
...Here is the town crier of the millennium (I swear this is the first and last time I use the M word) taking the drama from darkness to light, from concealment to revelation, from the murk of corporate secrecy to the vibrancy of humane muckraking...
...Political expediency suspends the revelation and puts the mole's existence in peril...
...The keynote image is of AI Pacino as Commonweal | 8 January 14, 2000 Bergman, a sleepless tiger with a cordless phone, pacing back and forth on the beach in back of his house, the ocean roaring behind him, the world of media at his ear, exhortation and petition on his lips...
...TAK!NG ON HOLLYWOOD Action & other fatalities , !" ack in September, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (DConn...
...The Insider fits snugly enough into the category of journalistic thriller-expos6 but, as I tried to suggest above, it's also something of an espionage drama, an industrial espionage thriller with agents of CBS (Bergman, Wallace) pitted against agents of B&W (corporate lawyers and, if we are to believe Wigand, anonymous thugs...
...A patriotic American discovers that a mighty and paranoid superpower is trying to undermine the health of this country, even to the point of turning many of us into addicts...
...The crudeness and ribaldry were, of course, part of a deliberate marketing ploy, designed to tickle palates grown jaded by constant repasts of R-rated movies and cable shows...
...Each halfhour episode boasted profanity (discreetly bleeped), sexual innuendo ("We all know the erotic effects of reptiles," ran one recent line), gratuitous vulgarity ("I have Harvey Keitel pummeling Winona Ryder's face with a fire iron-it's not a woman's movie...
...There are worse ways to be slandered...
...Crowe's brilliance is to indicate all sorts of movement under that mask, yet we yearn to peek behind it...
...The mole is Jeffrey Wigand, a scientific researcher and vicepresident of B&W who was fired for criticizing the additive and who, infuriated by the secrecy agreements he was forced to sign before departing, becomes a whistle blower...
...The tale told is mostly true but is the movie fair...
...And so forth...
...The two lead actors are superb, yet what a difference in the results...
...B&W's CEO (played with oozing malice by Michael Gambon) is photographed by Dante Spinotti as a sort of Beria ensconced in a building of shadowy corridors patrolled by security guards who look like the worst thugs ever trained by the KGB...
...Threats appear on the scientist's e-mail...
...The occasion was the presentation of the Silver Sewer Award, an honorific the twoman Morals Squad confers on objectionable cultural programming...
...Just let Wigand work on his golf at a driving range and a sinister figure materializes at the adjacent tee, his every perfect shot a mockery of Wigand's nervous flubs...
...Wigand is the real protagonist of the first two-thirds, and the texture of the film echoes his fearfulness with scenes that are shadowy, coiled, and conspiratorial...
...it's Brown & Williamson, an American corporation that makes cigarettes and may have added a chemical substance to its product to make nicotine more addictive...
...Fair to cigarette manufacturers...
...A1 Pacino, usually an actor with a few too many flourishes for my taste, plays Bergman with immense energy but no frills...
...in Pastoral Mil Master of A~s in Pastoral Ministry and Master oJ r of Arts in Pastoral Ministry and ] ~i Psychology, Joint Master of AI ~ Master of Science in Nursing, i ~tional Specialization, Ph.D...
...The Institute, established in 1971, is one of the largest graduate facilities in North America dedicated to educating men and women in religious education and pistol ministry...
...Action's" creators might have been aiming deliberately for that Silver Sewer as they crafted the adventures of Peter Dragon (Jay Mohr), an ambitious blond film producer who would score in the negative numbers if there were ever a morals Olympics...
...in:'~ ~11 as a Continuing Education p~ ~ ~:~: ~s :fundamental purpose of ~tudents for academic and ~ religious education and pas~ wltl~in a Catholic nniversityi~ ~ task of educating for minis[~i ing students' understandingS:it through the insights derived 'h ~~ ~!~ special emphasis is comple~i li~ : .. :~ :: ~\~:'~ ~ ~ ::~e~:umenical dialogue and stu~ Lent to Commonweal | 9 January 14, 2000 of PBS...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 1
