The Insider (1999) Review
9/10
A tobacco company dismisses a research scientist and signs him to a confidentiality agreement. A television producer wants him to talk. Neither of them understands yet what the company can use the agreement to do, or what the network will do when it finds out.
The 9 is for a film that makes contract law frightening. Nothing physical is at stake for most of the running time, the threat is entirely legal and reputational, and Mann shoots it like a siege picture.
It received seven nominations, won none, and lost Best Picture to American Beauty. It’s also the best film Mann has made and the best performance of Russell Crowe’s career.
This is the Mann film I’d hand to anyone who thinks he only makes crime pictures. I find it more gripping than his gunfights, and almost nothing in it is physical. What affects me most is the dread. A man reads a contract and my stomach tightens, and no other legal drama has ever done that to me.
It also lost money, taking around sixty-eight million worldwide against a budget near ninety. That’s part of why a film this good isn’t discussed more. Nothing keeps a picture in circulation like a profit.
The Threat Is a Document
Wigand has signed a confidentiality agreement. The film’s entire first hour is about what that document permits the company to do to him, and it’s more frightening than any weapon in Mann’s other work.
The specificity makes it work. Medical coverage for a daughter with asthma, a severance payment, a mortgage, and a clause that can remove all three, and the film establishes each of those before it establishes any danger.
The house itself is the film’s most efficient object. It’s new, it sits in a subdivision, and it’s clearly the largest purchase the family has ever made. The film shoots it the way it shoots everything else Wigand is about to lose, and I think that quiet image of a nice suburban house frightens me more than the bullet in the mailbox that comes later.
That’s the craft decision the whole picture rests on. An abstract threat is nothing and a threat to a specific arrangement is everything, and the film spends twenty minutes on the arrangement first.
When physical intimidation does arrive, a bullet in a mailbox and a figure on a golf course, it’s almost a relief, and the film knows it. Wigand can understand a threat like that. He can’t understand a subpoena. The Mississippi restraining order is the sharpest version of it. A court in one state orders him not to testify in another, and the film spends real time on the jurisdictional question. That’s the least cinematic thing imaginable and is gripping.
Establish exactly what a character has before you threaten it. A mortgage, a medical plan and a school produce more tension than a gun, because the reader can price them. The failure mode is threatening a life in general. Nobody can feel that. Legal and financial jeopardy is undervalued in fiction because it looks undramatic on a page. It’s the most common form of real fear and almost nobody writes it.
A physical threat arriving late in a film about paperwork reads as a lesser danger. That inversion is available and Mann uses it deliberately.
Crowe
Crowe was thirty-five playing a man in his fifties.
He gained weight, grayed his hair, and built the whole performance on suppressed anger and social awkwardness. I’d put it above anything else he’s done, and what I admire most is his refusal to ask for our affection. Watching him hold his temper in check for two and a half hours is more tense to me than most car chases.
Wigand is difficult. He’s precise, humorless, easily offended, bad at explaining himself, and has a temper he’s visibly managing at all times, and the film declines to make him likeable as a route to making him sympathetic. The best sequence is a deposition in Mississippi. He answers questions carefully, a lawyer who wants him to stop interrupts him, and the scene is entirely about whether a man will complete a sentence. The deposition also establishes what the confidentiality agreement really does. A Kentucky order is read into the record, the opposing counsel invokes it sentence by sentence, and the film lets the audience watch a document work in real time. The hotel room is the other one. He’s alone, has lost everything, and the film stages a hallucination of his daughters in the room. That’s the only unrealistic moment in the picture and the only time it goes inside him.
Diane Venora plays the wife and the part is unforgiving. Liane didn’t sign up for any of it, says so, and leaves, and the film treats her departure as reasonable and not as a betrayal. That’s rarer in this genre than it should be.
Pacino and the Second Half
Lowell Bergman is a producer who has spent a career getting people to talk and now can’t protect the one who did.
Pacino is loud, which is his tone by 1999, and the film uses it correctly. Bergman shouts at people because shouting is his professional tool, and the film contrasts it against Wigand, who can’t raise his voice at all.
Their first meeting is conducted entirely by fax and telephone. That’s a period detail the film uses well. Two men negotiate something enormous through a machine in a hallway, and neither of them can read the other’s face for the first twenty minutes. The second half is about the corporate pressure on the broadcast, an unusual subject for a film. Sixty Minutes has the interview, the network’s legal department raises tortious interference, and the segment is cut. That’s a real event and the film is specific about the mechanism. A network facing an acquisition can’t afford a lawsuit, so the journalism is a liability, and nobody in the chain does anything obviously wrong.
The Westinghouse deal is named and the numbers are stated. That’s the decision that makes the second half work. A named corporate transaction with a stated value is what converts an editorial argument into an arithmetic one.
Christopher Plummer plays Mike Wallace and the performance is the film’s sharpest piece of casting. Wallace is vain, formidable, good at the job, and initially willing to let the segment go, and Plummer plays the vanity and the capability as the same quality.
Contrast your two leads on a single dimension. One shouts professionally and one can’t raise his voice, and every scene between them is that difference without a word about it. Pick the dimension that matters to the plot. Here it’s the ability to speak. That’s what the whole film is about.
Pacino also gets the film’s one moment of open contempt. He tells a colleague that the network is protecting an asset instead of a story, and the line is delivered as an accusation against people who are in the room and who don’t disagree.
An institution that does nothing obviously wrong and destroys somebody anyway is harder to write and truer than a villain. Every person in the chain has a defensible reason.
Name the mechanism. Tortious interference is the legal concept that kills the story, and the film says so, and the specificity is why the audience believes the outcome.
Mann Shoots It Like a Thriller
Dante Spinotti photographed it, and the approach is Mann’s usual, applied to material with no action in it. I think that gamble is the smartest decision in the film. Giving a story about paperwork the visual weight of a crime picture could have looked silly, and instead it pays off in nearly every scene.
Long lenses, shallow focus, faces isolated against out-of-focus backgrounds, and an insistence on filming conversations as though they were confrontations. A man on a telephone is shot like a man under fire.
The score is the other half. Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke supply a soundscape of drones and wordless voice that runs under almost everything, and the effect is to make a fax machine ominous.
The golf course sequence is the purest example. A man plays a hole, notices somebody watching from a distance, and the film gives it the lens length, the score and the cutting rhythm of an ambush, and nothing at all happens. Mann also uses empty space in a way that’s unusual for a thriller. Wigand alone in a hotel room, a corridor, a car park, and the film repeatedly gives a man far more room than he needs and lets the excess isolate him.
Some of this is excessive and the film is better for it. A scene of a man deciding whether to return a phone call, scored like a siege, is ridiculous on paper and works completely.
The justification is that this is how the situation feels from inside it. A man whose mortgage and medical coverage depend on a phone call is under siege, and the film is rendering his experience instead of the room. Mann also structures it as two films joined at the middle. The first is Wigand deciding to speak and the second is the network deciding whether to let him, and the handoff happens around the ninety minute mark without any announcement.
1999 and American Beauty
Best Picture went to American Beauty. The other nominees were this, The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile and The Cider House Rules.
That year also produced Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Three Kings, The Matrix, Election and Eyes Wide Shut, none of which was nominated. That makes 1999 the strongest year for American film in several decades and the Best Picture list a poor account of it. The argument against the winner has strengthened with time, partly for reasons unrelated to the film and partly because a suburban midlife narrative has aged less well than a film about corporate power and a confidentiality agreement. I agree with the argument against American Beauty, and I’d make it louder. The Academy picking a suburban midlife crisis over a film about a corporation burying the truth looks like a bigger mistake the longer I think about it. This film’s subject has aged in the opposite direction. Every element of it, the non-disclosure agreement, the acquisition pressure on journalism, the liability calculation that removes a story, is more recognizable now than it was in 1999. Disney also had a stake in the outcome. That closes the circle. A film about a corporation suppressing a story about itself was released by a company with its own broadcast division and its own reasons for caution.
A work about institutional mechanics ages better than one about a mood. Suburban ennui was current in 1999 and a liability calculation is permanent. Pick the subject that will still be operating in thirty years. Structures outlast feelings.
Seven nominations and no wins is a familiar outcome and it usually means a film everybody respected and nobody was enthusiastic about. Respect doesn’t win votes.
Look at what wasn’t nominated in a strong year. The omissions describe the institution more accurately than the winner does.
Should you watch The Insider?
Yes, and it’s Mann’s best. I give it a 9 because it made me afraid of a confidentiality agreement, got the finest performance of Russell Crowe’s career, and turned a network killing its own story into a crime with no criminal. My only gripe is the length, since two and a half hours asks a lot even when nearly every minute counts. Scoring a fax machine like an artillery barrage took nerve, and I wish more directors had it.
