'The Insider': Applauding journalists as heroes

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Back in the 1970s, Hollywood made heroes out of journalists. In fact, with the Woodward-Bernstein team uncovering the Watergate scandal, journalists became heroes in their own right. Cinema just helped to highlight them, with films like All the President's Men and The Parallax View depicting newspeople as relentless seekers of truth and crusaders of freedom of expression.

The 1980s and the 1990s saw it differently, though. From Absence of Malice (1981) onwards, journalists were no longer portrayed in a flattering light. Rather than the exemplary defenders of righteousness they used to be, they mostly come out as merciless hound dogs and obnoxious invaders of privacy.

With whistle-blowers, it's a different story. In movies, they always come out as heroes, or at least martyrs. Jack Cadell, the nuclear plant employee Jack Lemmon plays in The China Syndrome (1979) and Karen Silkwood, the real-life, doomed plant worker Meryl Streep personifies in Silkwood (1983), to cite some examples, are people who are willing to risk their jobs and even their lives to tell the truth.

The Insider has all of these elements stored together. This fact-based movie has the martyr/whistle-blower in the person of Jeffrey Wigand, an ex-tobacco company researcher who has decided to betray his former employees in order to reveal the cold, hard truth. It also has the good, moralistic journalist in the form of Lowell Bergman, a persistent newsman who will stop at nothing to help truth be revealed. And the film has the "bad," corrupt journalists as well, namely CBS'60 minutes newsmagazine producers, who stand in the way of that truth being disclosed.

This film inevitably brings back memories of All the President's Men; after all, it's been a long time since a movie has shown the intricacies of journalistic work and the courageous men and women who do it. And just like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman who play Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in that Watergate drama, Al Pacino, who plays Lowell Bergman in this movie, is equally a fixture of 1970s Hollywood.

The film begins with Bergman being dragged blindfolded through the streets of Teheran in order to fix an interview between the leader of the Mujaheddin and Mike Wallace, the veteran anchorman of 60 Minutes, for which Bergman works as a producer. This prologue establishes Bergman as a brilliant, efficient newsman, as well as an effective mediator who can cool things down as the prima donna Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer) challenges the authority of a gun-toting Iranian.

Next, Bergman starts working on a story about the tobacco industry, and, looking for someone who can translate a stack of documents he gets from a Philip Morris source, he comes across Wigand's name. Wigand (Russell Crowe), who has just been fired from his executive position at Brown & Williamson, is reluctant at first, but, needing the money, he finally accepts the offer. Their collaboration later evolves into something else: Bergman convinces Wigand that the public has the right to know about the tobacco industry's unhealthy practices and gets him into an agreement to testify about it in a television interview.

At first, The Insider may seem like an "issue movie," with its lengthy discourse on the tobacco industry's evil schemes, and, in particular, the way top executives from the seven largest tobacco companies testified before the Congress that they believed nicotine was not addictive, while insiders like Wigand knew that this was contrary to the truth.

But director Michael Mann, who also co-wrote and co-produced this movie, knows better. Mann, who created the Miami Vice TV series and made big, long, insignificant movies such as The Last of the Mohicans and Heat (which also stars Pacino), knows that there is an intriguing story in the heart of Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article that told about the Bergman-Wigand concord. Mann's skillful adaptation has made The Insider a big, long, but very significant movie.

As the film progresses, it's no longer about a journalist and a whistle-blower who work together to uncover the truth. It becomes a battle of two individuals against the Goliath-like corporate establishment. Wigand has to face death threats and other kinds of pressure from his former employers, while Bergman conflicts with CBS bigwigs and 60 minutes top dogs, including Wallace, who suddenly freak out and refuse to air the Wigand interview, fearing a massive lawsuit and the botch of a lucrative deal CBS is about to sign with another conglomerate.

Ultimately, the film is about the strong personalities and unwavering determination that drive the two men through a test of perseverance and even a test of trust toward each other. And they wouldn't have existed on screen if not delivered by the first- rate performances of the two lead actors.

Pacino, as usual, chews up the scenes with his bigger-than- life persona, but it is Crowe who stands out with his beautifully subtle display of a man whose life slowly unravels as he stubbornly clings to his moralistic convictions.