You don’t need to do much to sell most of Michael Mann‘s movies. In Heat, he pits a crew of skilled bank robbers against an obsessed, equally formidable police detective. In Collateral, an unassuming cab driver ends up the hostage of a hit man with a list of people he needs to kill in one night. These films sell themselves. They are based around obviously exciting concepts, directed with reliably eye-catching style, and — more often than not — feature recognizable movie stars. Mann has, in other words, spent most of his career making pretty widely appealing movies.
The Insider is one of the rare exceptions to that rule. The film, based on a 1996 novel by American journalist Marie Brenner, follows real-life whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (played in The Insider by Russell Crowe) as he works with 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) to bring to light the tobacco industry’s secret attempts to use chemicals like ammonia to increase the addictive powers of everyday cigarettes. It is a 158-minute thriller about one whistleblower’s efforts to maneuver through stifling corporate red tape and countless legal loopholes, all while his co-conspirator tries to actually bring his information to the public.
The Insider shouldn’t work — not as a movie, at least. It’s a film full of urgent phone calls, coded faxes, and conversations in boardrooms, and that’s not to mention the fact that its final half revolves entirely around the cutting down of one segment of a news special. Nothing about it screams, on paper, cinematic. And yet The Insider doesn’t just work; it rivets, thrills, and moves. It is one of Mann’s finest achievements — a slick, propulsive thriller that turns Wigand and Bergman’s real-life collaboration into a full-throated exploration of not only the bravery but also the unbending persistence required to tell and share the truth in a world that only ever wants to make you look the other way.
A drama drenched in paranoia
The first half of The Insider is a paranoia-soaked drama in which the increasing obligation that its whistleblower protagonist feels to share the troubling truths he knows about the tobacco industry with the world is met with death threats, suffocating non-disclosure agreements, late-night break-ins, courtroom shakedowns, and troublingly cold visits from the FBI. Mann, who co-wrote The Insider‘s script with Eric Roth, uses this section of the film to make viewers feel and understand just how hard it is to try to do the morally right, honest thing in modern corporate America. At every turn, Wigand’s life not only seems to be on the verge of falling apart but potentially ending altogether.
Mann makes this clear with countless haunting visuals, including one of Wigand opening his family’s mailbox to find a single bullet waiting inside. The director’s usual, instinctual editing rhythms are on full display throughout The Insider‘s first half as well. The film alternately crawls and surges forward at a pace that only makes what Wigand is attempting to do seem all the more unwieldy, dangerous, and impossible to manage and control.
The Insider’s hero is just a normal guy trying to do what’s right
While Crowe is allowed to beautifully portray both his character’s fear and his quiet strength, Mann resists painting him as some iconic hero. He is a normal man with a soft-spoken tone, occasional stutter, and tendency to lower his head and try to move unseen through the world. He and his wife, Liane (Diane Venora), are just as Pacino’s Lowell describes them at one point: “ordinary people under extraordinary pressure.” That only makes Wigand’s midpoint decision to go forward with Lowell’s plan and record a 60 Minutes special blowing open the full, corrupt truth of the very tobacco industry he’d made a living in all the more powerful.
His recording of his 60 Minutes interview with the program’s longtime, revered anchor, Mike Wallace (a towering Christopher Plummer), marks the moment when The Insider leaves its first, Russell Crowe-led half behind and enters its Al Pacino-dominated second. The film becomes not just a thriller about the difficulties of telling the truth but also sharing it when Lowell’s exuberance over Wigand’s interview is quickly killed by his CBS higher-ups, who decide to push the airing of the full segment. They do so out of fear of a lawsuit from Wigand’s former employer that could threaten the viability of CBS’ forthcoming sale to Westinghouse, a fact that Lowell rightly calls out with fitting indignation and condemnation in an office confrontation that gives Pacino one of the most memorable, ferocious, and breathtaking monologues of his entire, storied career.
The high price for telling the truth
Lowell realizes just how close Wigand’s interview is to being killed altogether. He is confronted with the full horror of America’s corporation-controlled contemporary news industry. The sickening feeling that The Insider provokes when Lowell reveals just how much money his bosses are going to potentially lose if CBS’ sale to Westinghouse is torpedoed by an expensive external lawsuit has only grown more potent over the past 25 years, too. A world in which corporate interests govern America’s very news cycle isn’t a foreign concept to us anymore, but Pacino’s Lowell is left understandably disgusted by this reality. “You pay me to go get guys like Wigand — to draw him, to get him to trust us, to get him to go on television,” he roars, pointing out how much trust is required to get sources like Crowe’s whistleblower to put themselves on the line in the first place.
When he is essentially dismissed and forced to go on vacation, The Insider follows Pacino’s headstrong news producer as he claws his way through the back channels of the journalism world to get Wigand’s full interview on the air. All the while, Mann keeps his eye trained on Wigand, who spirals into an even worse abyss of hopelessness when he discovers how depressingly close the interview he put his entire life on the line for is to never being released. Wigand’s heartbreak, as well as the debt that Lowell feels to his source, are rendered vibrantly clear in The Insider‘s third act, in which both the film’s heroes and its viewers are forced to contend with just how few people nowadays seem actually interested in telling the truth and doing the right thing when doing so comes with a potential cost to them.
A pyrrhic victory
In the end, of course, Lowell succeeds in airing his version of Wigand’s 60 Minutes episode. However, while this moment is given the emotional profundity it deserves for Crowe’s beleaguered man, The Insider stops short of a complete, optimistic celebration. In the wake of the episode’s release, Pacino’s Lowell informs Plummer’s Mike that he has quit 60 Minutes. When Mike expresses dismay over Lowell’s decision, Pacino’s disillusioned newsman responds, “What do I tell a source on the next tough story? ‘Hang in with us, you’ll be fine — maybe’? No… What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.”
It is a bittersweet conclusion that comes out of nowhere and yet The Insider completely earns. In its final moments, the film expands its scope beyond the news industry to America and the world at large. What do we do when our trust in the cornerstone institutions of our society is chipped and broken? That’s a break that, as The Insider‘s co-lead mournfully notes, can’t simply be put “back together again.” It is an existential loss that encourages us to shed our integrity and abandon our sense of honesty altogether, and it’s one that The Insider barrels toward with formal confidence and righteous anger over the course of two and a half hours.
The film, consequently, emerges as something far bigger and more vital than just a thriller about the making of a single news segment. It is as impeccably crafted a drama as any other that Mann has ever made, and its themes seem to have only deepened and sharpened in the 25 years since it was released.
The Insider is available to rent on all major digital platforms.