The Insider - Starring Al Pacino, Russell Crowe - Movies - http://maxpages.com/nzew/The

His last film was the crime epic Heat. His latest, The Insider, is about smoke. And in it director Michael Mann has more than enough fire to stoke nearly three hours on screen - even if the raw fuel might seem too dense or damp to be cinematically combustible.

On the face of it, it's a complex, factual story about one man's stand against the American tobacco industry which once employed him, alongside one of how a ratings-driven media could hang that man out to dry when cowed by corporate muscle. You could say it's a film with issues. Big issues.

Fortunately, it's also a film that uses that lengthy running time for extra clarity and immediacy, care of Eric Roth's taut screenplay, itself inspired by a Vanity Fair article about the affair titled "The Man Who Knew Too Much".

And it offers detailed character study - especially with Russell Crowe's startling portrayal of scientist and tobacco company executive Dr Jeffrey Wigand.

Crowe is all but unrecognisable, having packed on the kilos and the make-up to play the fiftysomething Wigand. His performance as the variously flawed, bitter and despondent whistleblower is the hottest single flame in this film.

And he's up against Al Pacino, mercifully restrained and convincing as 60 Minutes reporter Lowell Bergman. We meet Bergman negotiating an interview with a Sheik terrorist leader in the Middle East (Cliff Curtis under the robes and beard), the implication being that machinegun-toting Muslim fundamentalists are nothing compared to reporting on American Fortune 400 companies.

Having approached Wigand, who has been fired for not toeing the company line from his position as head of r&d at United States tobacco giant Brown and Williamson, to be a consultant on a smoking story, Bergman convinces him to be interviewed about unethical practices in the tobacco industry. Wigand agrees, despite a gagging clause in the severance package.

But 60 Minutes broadcaster CBS refuses to air the interview, fearing a lawsuit which might also effect the network's share price in a forthcoming corporate merger.

Left in limbo, Wigand is discredited by a smear campaign, his life is threatened and his wife leaves him, taking his two daughters.

That it all happened that way, back in the early 90s, is all too believable, even if Mann's glossy delivery and director's flourishes can overbake things visually.

But throughout, Mann's exacting eye for human truth and the performances keep the people in sharp focus in the wide-screen background of those issues, as they head from congressional hearing to courtroom to television studio.

It centres on Bergman and Wigand. It's very much a three-hour male bonding session in some ways, the story as much about the friendship and trust which develops from their mutual urge to tell the truth, no matter the consequences, as it is about their battles with two supposedly different corporations.

It's an intelligent, gripping and brave film, one which rewards the investment of extra attention span with interest.

You can think of The Insider, perhaps, as the filter-tipped All The President's Men, a film which really does the business on how some big businesses go about theirs.

n.e.w@journalist.com

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Page Updated Sun Mar 26, 2000 5:59am EST