Where There's Smoke

The Players:

Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe: Former research head at Brown and Williamson tobacco, and key witness in a $200 billion tobacco lawsuit

Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino: "60 Minutes" producer, gets Wigand to spill his secrets first on "60 Minutes"

Mike Wallace, played by Christopher Plummer: "60 Minutes" anchor, waffles on whether to support his own piece on Wigand.

Don Hewitt, played by Philip Baker Hall: Head of "60 Minutes," blocks Wigand interview for corporate reasons

Michael Mann's The Insider is an epic-sized film based on the "60 Minutes" tobacco scandal of a few years ago; Mann succeeds in distilling a very convoluted and controversial story into a relatively taut two hours. However, his magnum opus is not without flaws and plays like an uncompleted character study, a film that stops just short of greatness.

The film focuses on Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, a research executive at Brown and Williamson, a tobacco company; he is wrongfully fired from his job and is soon courted by Lowell Bergman, a "60 Minutes" producer, about a possible tobacco-related story. Wigand is the highest-ranking tobacco insider to ever step forward; he knows every dirty little secret about what exactly companies put into cigarettes, and it's not pretty. Dogged by a confidentiality contract, Wigand is at first reluctant to talk; Bergman coaxes him into talking to "60 Minutes," in the interest of the health of the American people, and Wigand finally agrees.

But his life is threatened, his ex-employers hire thugs to stalk and scare him, and his wife leaves with their two daughters; he loses everything for a chance to set the record straight and doubts whether the price was worth it. Meanwhile, Bergman can't get Wigand's interview on the air at CBS; Don Hewitt and the corporate heads fear a multi-billion lawsuit from Brown and Williamson, and Bergman must plead with Hewitt and anchor Mike Wallace to get the ground-breaking interview on "60 Minutes." The loose, organic structure of the film works its magic in the first third of the movie; the pacing is deliberate and slow, allowing the film to get under Wigand's skin and into his life.

Crowe's Wigand is undoubtedly the body and soul of the film; Crowe plays Wigand like a modern Hamlet, a quiet, broken shell of a man, and endows him with incredible dignity and grace. In this quietly riveting performance, Crowe captures every nuance of his character's dilemma and slow collapse; he heartbreakingly portrays Wigand's paranoia, depression and bewilderment.

Al Pacino's Lowell Bergman is unrelenting, highly moral, and loyal to Wigand during turbulent times. At first, Bergman's motives for courting Wigand seem a bit suspect and self-serving; there is an intriguing ambiguity to the character that is soon dropped and forgotten, much to the detriment of the character.

Upstaging Pacino is Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace; he's cocky as hell, he's arrogant, he's sometimes petulant, but he's got all the good lines and uses them well. A scenery-chewing performance could have done fine, but Plummer develops Wallace into something other than a flat parody; he makes a dynamic, human journey in minimal screen time and turns in an uncharacteristically strong supporting performance.

With this film, Mann proves that he is at the top of his form as an actor's director. Mann's cameras work in intimate closeness with his actors. And the cast works well with Mann's studied technique, which forces them into ultra-realism under the camera's close scrutiny. But the astonishing character study that dominates the first half begins to unravel when the film, inexplicably, changes its focus from Wigand to Bergman. Just as Wigand is entering his darkest period, becoming psychologically unhinged, the film cuts away to Bergman and his struggles with the brass at CBS. The heroic, moral air that builds up around Bergman in the last third almost suffocates the intricate and brilliant tale before it and threatens to turn the film into a full-blown, us-vs.-them morality tale.

The greatest strength of the film is in its actors but in the last part of the film, Crowe's Wigand almost disappears, and Pacino's Bergman is given scenes full of moral posturing that are completely out of character. After weaving a difficult and astonishing narrative, Mann begins to lose the thread; he sacrifices complexity for black-and-white morality and substitutes shapeless confrontations for emotional depth.

Pace is the film's largest failing; though a deliberate pace helped the first half succeed very admirably, it fails when the tensions are rising by not building to a climax. Mann's film slackens and almost sputters out.

Can a whole be less than the sum of its parts? In the case of The Insider, yes, it can be true. Although the film should garner nominations for Actor, Supporting Actor and Screenplay come Oscar time, I can't help but feel a little disappointed that Michael Mann's well-crafted film could have been a true contender, and instead came up short as an epic-that-almost-was.

Turning Fact into Fiction

Before shooting The Insider, Michael Mann sent a draft of the screenplay to "60 Minutes" anchor Mike Wallace, who expressed concern about Mann's streamlining of actual events. Upset about being portrayed as floundering morally next to Bergman's shining knight, Wallace fumed, "oh, how fortunate I am to have Lowell Bergman's moral tutelage to point me down the shining path." Mann turned right around, and had Wallace's fictional counterpart spout the same line in his film.

If the line between fact and fiction is always shaky, how well-defined is it in The Insider? Although Mann has admitted to taking dramatic license with some of the characters and events, the film nevertheless presents itself as a hard-hitting, true-to-life account of exactly what went on behind the scenes at "60 Minutes." And Mann's version of the "truth," however manipulated it might be, is raising pulses and tempers at "60 Minutes."

Although Mann has added certain specifics to the story, like invented dialogue, Lowell Bergman insists that the essence of the story is intact. "The big, broad truths of this are all public record," says Bergman. "In that sense the film is basically accurate." But does "basically accurate" really cut it for a film dealing with such delicate subject matter? The real-life Wigand and Bergman, the two protagonists of the film, have not objected to Mann's portrayals of themselves and their stories. However, Bergman says his character in the film is "too neat" to really be him, and Wigand has said that he never quite sunk to the emotional depths that his character reached. Pacino has even been quoted as saying that his character, Bergman, "was a composite of three or four people in Michael's and [co-writer] Eric Roth's mind."

As long as these differences help to make a better film, without sacrificing the essence of the figures involved, then they should be tolerated. But trying to fit real people into a "protagonist" or "antagonist" mold usually does mean tampering with the facts, and can portray people unfairly. Although Wigand and Bergman do not mind that their characterizations were altered for the film, the crew at "60 Minutes" have had a very different reaction.

Mike Wallace, who has not yet seen the film, is especially touchy about his portrayal on-screen. He is afraid of being distorted, of having his reputation damaged by Mann's film or of being made out as the "bad guy" of the story. If Wallace is worried about looking bad in the film, he has little to worry about; although his character does waver, for understandable reasons, he ultimately decides to support Bergman and put the interview on. In the film, Wallace is an intriguing, human, and very sympathetic character; he is not without flaws, but despite this, he's very likeable.

But what if Mann, for dramatic emphasis in the film, had decided to make Wallace and Hewitt look as amoral and unsympathetic as possible, thus completely misrepresenting their characters? Does Mann have more of an obligation to creating his art or of representing the figures and events involved in a fair and factual way?

Mann has certain responsibilities as a filmmaker, but he also has the right to tell a story; it is his decision on how to balance the obligations of fact and fiction, and hopefully he will respect the powers of each. "Wallace and Hewitt have criticized the film because it's Michael Mann's view of my perspective, or Wigand's perspective," Bergman says. Luckily, Mann, even with the dramatic license he takes, is still committed to telling the true story; but what if the next filmmaker who comes along decides to sacrifice fact for fiction's sake?

The Insider raises pressing questions about the boundaries between reality and fiction, and while there may not be rules about how to represent the truth, perhaps there should be responsibilities. In light of this, perhaps The Insider is being misrepresented as a "true" account; it might be more befitting of Mann to market his film as a kind of "historical fiction" than as the real thing.