Mann fills The Insider with mirrors, windows, and all manner of frames within frames. Based on a Vanity Fair article, the first half of the film narrates the plight of Jeffrey Wigand, the first whistleblower to bring the predatory practices of big tobacco to public attention in the 90s. The second half of the film shifts focus to Lowell Bergman, whose manic intensity brought to life by Al Pacino eventually lands Wigand’s story in the media.
A centerpiece of the film is a rare surreal flourish from Mann, in which the linear shadows and walls around Wigand visibly dissipate. His children, who have since left with his wife, play outside in a sunlit yard and he can see everything he has lost in the media shuffle. The Insider suggests that investigative journalism and the ethics of waking up have a human scale. Wigand reminds Mike Wallace at the end of the film that, “What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.” It is a stunning and prescient self-indictment, which has surely set the tone for the Mannings, Wikileaks, and Panama Papers of our past decade.
—Michael Leary
- Directed by: Michael Mann
- Produced by: Pieter Jan Brugge Michael Mann
- Written by: Marie Brenner Eric Roth Michael Mann
- Music by: Pieter Bourke Lisa Gerrard
- Cinematography by: Dante Spinotti
- Editing by: William Goldenberg David Rosenbloom Paul Rubell
- Release Date: 1999
- Running Time: 157
- Language: English
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