Whistle-blower versus big capital
Review by Tyrion Perkins
The Insider
Directed by Michael Mann
Starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe
The Insider exposes the lengths that big business will go to stop the people knowing how much harm it does to make profits. The film is based on the "true story" of Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe) who is sacked from his job as director of research of the tobacco company Brown & Williamson.
Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), a producer for the top-rating US current affairs show 60 Minutes and former '60s radical, stumbles upon the fact that Wigand knows a lot about the tobacco industry's deadly secrets. Wigand has signed an all-embracing "confidentiality" agreement that prevents him talking, but he wants to talk. Bergman is determined to find a way for him to blow the whistle.
Having decided to talk, Wigand must run a gauntlet of death threats, intimidation, court orders, threats of jail and many other attempts by big tobacco to stop him telling what he knows. 60 Minutes' network, CBS, pulls the plug at the last minute for fear of the financial and legal consequences.
In some ways this film is anti-capitalist: a tobacco company and a television broadcaster are both shown to put financial interests above the well-being of people. However, the story is written from a totally individual perspective.
It is about a victim, Wigand, who suffers much personal hurt at the hands of the company and the courts, and the hero, Bergman, who single-handedly fights big business, and his own employer, to get the story on the air and to see the promises he made to Wigand are kept.
Bergman understands the power of the media in forming people's opinions, but receives a harsh lesson in the power behind the media when his company pulls the segment. However, in the end he is saved by his contacts in the bourgeois press who expose CBS's cowardice. I kept thinking a public campaign would have by-passed some of Wigand and Bergman's problems.
This movie does not teach us anything new. Everyone knows tobacco companies have lied about what their products do, and it is common knowledge that they use chemicals that cause cancer to increase the effect of the nicotine. For those that know that capitalism is a problem, this movie will reinforce why. For those that are yet to come to that conclusion, they will merely see a few of its excesses used to create an exciting cloak and dagger story.
Time magazine summed it up: "At heart, the movie is about family betrayal, the corporate torture of two insiders by the people they worked for and with."
But should I complain? It is good that a movie as political as this is released through Touchstone (a division of Walt Disney Co.).
The movie is tense and exciting, at times claustrophobic, with a constant feeling of menace. It is based on a piece about Wigand by Marie Brenner that appeared in Vanity Fair in May 1996. The real Bergman describes the movie as "emotionally and philosophically accurate" but "not a documentary, it's more of a historical novel".
Not only are the scenes made up by the writers, but also the order of events. According to an article in last August's Real to Reel by D.M. Osbourne, the court deposition that Wigand gives occurred a month after CBS decided not to air Wigand's interview. In the movie it is used as a reason Wigand could talk on CBS, and gives Bergman the credit for orchestrating everything. Among other changes listed by Osbourne, Bergman is seen to get the Wall Street Journal to change their story on Wigand when he had no contact with it before the article ran.
Disney doesn't pretend that the movie is a true representation, just "entertainment". I don't see why a more accurate representation would not have been just as entertaining. But nor do I don't think that altering the details changes the value of this film as a powerful portrayal of the way big business fucks over the little people.