The Insider poster & wallpaper

Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer, Philip Baker Hall

On the edge of exposing one of the decade's most incendiary public health issues, "60 Minutes" television producer Lowell Bergman must convince former tobacco industry insider Dr. Jeffrey Wigand to re...( read more  read more... )veal the truth about the practices of cigarette companies, although the consequences to his career and family may be ruinous.

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87% liked it

47,188 ratings

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95% liked it

128 critics

R, 2 hrs. 35 min.

Directed by: Michael Mann

Release Date: November 5, 1999

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DVD Release Date: April 11, 2000

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The Insider Russell Crowe in The Insider
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Flixster Reviews (2,300)

  • SirPant
    September 23, 2009
    SirPant
    A powerful and important film, beautifully shot!
  • AgentLexi2132
    February 23, 2009
    AgentLexi2132
    "I told the truth."

    A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a "60 Minutes" expose on Big Tobacco.

    Al Pacino: Lowell Bergman

    Against this backdrop director Michael Mann gives us The Insider, a film every bit th...( read more)e equal in seriousness to All the President's Men. Russell Crowe plays Tobacco Executive Jeffrey Wigand. Al Pacino is Sixty Minutes Producer Lowell Bergman. Wigand has just been fired from his $300,000 a year job. Bergman wants help deciphering a tobacco industry document. The two of them start an uneasy relationship. The film suggests Wigand's employer began spooking his family before the executive agreed to become a whistleblower for Sixty Minutes. I doubt the truth there.

    Soon the two men are developing the story. The Mississippi Attorney General's office wants Wigand to testify. Reporter Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) is brought in to interview Wigand. Executive Producer Don Hewit (Anthony Michael Hall) is brought on board. Brown & Williamson gets wind of Wigand's betrayal. Bergman says it wasn't him who tipped B&W. Wigand begins a new job as a high school science teacher. Brown and Williamson assigns detectives to follow him and make trouble for Wigand's family. The Tobacco giant plants anti-Wigand stories in other Press outlets in anticipation of the Sixty Minutes bombshell. Wigand's wife and daughter leave him. He loses his home and the wife divorces him.

    The story keeps developing and the pressure builds. But the biggest problem is inside CBS itself. CBS Legal learns that Wigand has a contract with Brown & Williamson that provides for serious financial penalties if Wigand reveals ANY of its secrets, and CBS is liable too. All of a sudden the story is threatening the financial interests of the Network itself. Wallace and Hewitt agree to back off. Bergman is livid. He says CBS owner-CEO Laurence Tisch is betraying the news division because he is afraid a major liability suit will queer plans he has to sell the network to Westinghouse. Left out of the script is the news that the Tisch family owned Loews controls Lorillard, another of the seven giant tobacco companies in America. Even director Michael Mann had to make some concessions. He must have bargained away this embarassing little detail when making his own deal with CBS over what would appear in the script.

    Bergman has to tell Wigand the story has been squelched. After all he has had to put up with, Wigand is more than disappointed. Bergman begins leaking CBS' betrayal of the news division to other press outlets. Wallace is now angry that his own part in the coverup has been revealed. He and Bergman quarrel. The Producer is furloughed for a week by Hewitt. But CBS News has a black eye that would make Edward R. Murrow roll over in his grave. Wallace has a brilliant public relations ploy. Lets go over to Black Rock (CBS Corporate) and sell them a package that will save all our reputations. I won't tell you what the deal is though you can probably make a good guess.

    The film is two hours and 37 minutes long. It doesn't drag but its a very long sit for a film audience that is mostly under 30 and more interested in special effects than public affairs. In 1976 the film would have been hailed as something like the Second Coming. Today, a film like this is released with almost no fanfare. Its only hope is to capture enough awards to alert the mostly 35 and older audience that has abandoned filmgoing, at least in theatres. Two years ago, Crowe made a boffo debut in a wonderful film called LA Confidential that was soundly trounced at the Awards by the Carnivorous, youth-oriented Titanic. And Crowe, whose performance is tempered in this role, is one of the greatest screen actors to hit these shores since Marlon Brando, James Dean, George C. Scott and Tony Hopkins. Because he still insists on acting at a time when appearing in monster special effects packages is the key to success.., because of this, Crowe's success as a film actor is still not a cinch.

    There are other actors in this film that are wasted. Any film that would use Rip Torn as little as this one does, deserves a slap. Torn plays PR man John Scanlon, but he barely speaks a sentence. British actor Michael Gambon plays a high executive at B&W. His screentime is minimal. And Mann repeats a video clip of Gambon repeatedly. The guy who lit a welding torch to reshape the Otter's Uncle's Lincoln in Animal House 21 years ago is wonderful as one of the courtroom lawyers from Mississippi. Wings Hauser, the aptly named and wonderfully over -the-top B-movie actor who usually is larger than Richard Simmons onscreen, is subdued here as a B&W lawyer at a Mississippi court hearing. Speaking of subdued, the most interesting performance is Christopher Plummer's subtle underplaying of Mike Wallace. Plummer's Wallace almost seems to be subordinate to producer Bergman. I wonder if Wallace is really this quiet around his colleagues at the network. The Plummer portrayal is in savage contrast to the Mike Wallace we are used to on-air. Plummer makes no attempt to imitate the on-air Wallace. His delivery is sufficiently newsman-like, but it is not the hard-hitting TV character we are used to. Gina Gershon is sharp and sharklike playing the CBS Lawyer who deflates the team's hopes of putting the story on the air. And former New York Post Editor and columnist Pete Hamil plays a reporter-editor at the New York Times, one of the few Gotham publications he has not worked for.

    I wasn't crazy about this film, but in a debased American Cinema, the Insider stands out just because it is directed to an adult sensibility. There are many adults who will not enjoy this film. Its been a long time since Watergate. Not everyone is interested anymore.
    All in all this is a true masterpiece. Intellectual (which is rare in a film today), gripping, and truly mesmerizing in every sense of the meaning. This is by far among Mann's best work to date and if he churns out more treasures like this I will remain a fan forever.
  • thmtsang
    January 5, 2009
    thmtsang
    Al is a TV producer looking to expose the practices of the tobacco industry. Russell is the whistle blower who puts his life and family on the line to reveal the truth. Excellent performances. Intense.
  • QueenCityFilms
    January 3, 2009
    QueenCityFilms
    See this film immediately...one of Mann's finest.
  • mrpopcorn
    January 1, 2009
    mrpopcorn
    "Warning: Exposing the Truth May Be Hazardous"

    The Insider tells the true story of a man who decided to tell the world what the seven major tobacco companies knew (and concealed) about the dangers of their product. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) was a scientist employed...( read more) in research for a tobacco firm, Brown and Williamson. Not long after he was fired by Brown and Williamson, Wigand came into contact with Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), a producer for 60 Minutes who worked closely with journalist Mike Wallace (played here by Christopher Plummer). Bergman arranged for Wigand to be interviewed by Wallace for a 60 Minutes expose on the cigarette industry, though Wigand was still bound by a confidentiality agreement not to discuss his employment with the company. Despite Wigand's willingness to talk, CBS pulled his interview from at the last minute after Brown and Williamson threatened a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. The staff of 60 Minutes and CBS News were soon embroiled in an internal struggle over the killing of the story, and Wigand found himself the subject of lawsuits and a smear campaign, without his full story reaching the public.

    Review
    It is a rare pleasure to witness on screen a film which not only is enjoyable to watch but will also leave you with a sense of darkness, sorrow and regret. Strong dialogue and even stronger emotions are displayed by Al Pacino's "live on the edge" character Lowell Bergman and Russell Crowe's whistle-blowing Jeffrey Wigand will leave you saddened and hooked whilst the remainder of the cast give the performances of their lives. It's a tale of truth which slowly emerges whilst a character's faith quickly falls. A true masterpiece if ever there was one.
  • hossein13
    November 17, 2009
    hossein13
    November 2009 - Interesting but a bit long. I think the most important facto for the movies success was that it was based on a true story and real well known characters otherwise I am not sure if it would get the same ratings.
  • odonoghuematthew
    November 13, 2009
    odonoghuematthew
    Best Supporting actor 1999
  • ichisp
    November 5, 2009
    ichisp
    Acting passion like no other. Freaking amazing!
  • xtiandurden
    October 27, 2009
    xtiandurden
    A superb thriller. Crowe brought us his brilliant performance in this film and of course Pacino obviously would heat up the screens again, both actors are in the top of their game. From the director of a crime-action thriller "Heat," Michael Mann collaborated with Pacino and dire...( read more)cted this Best Picture contender drama-thriller. The photography is much more impressive, and I think Michael Mann improved his style. This will give you everything you need to see in a thriller.
  • magnolia12883
    October 20, 2009
    magnolia12883
    Michael Mann's epic is a profoundly angering film, a deeply absorbing thriller, a passionate and inspiring drama, and a fascinating expose of the lengths to which one particular industry will sometimes go to maintain their profit margin and silence potential dissenters. Based on ...( read more)true events, the film concerns Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a tobacco scientist in Kentucky who, when we first meet him, is packing his office up and being escorted from the high-end cigarette company he works for. Soon, he's approached to consult on some documents and their meaning for Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), a producer for the CBS evening news program "60 Minutes" with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer). Wigand offers to help decode the documents for Bergman and it's not long before his bosses (represented by Michael Gambon) are not so subtly threatening him by "expanding and clarifying the wording of his confidentiality agreement" and giving him ultimatums with regards to whether he can say word one on any subject relating to tobacco and its dettrimental nature with regards to human health. Soon, Wigand, his two young daughters and his wife (Diane Venora) are receiving e-mails threatening their lives and bullets are being put in their mailbox. Inevitably, Wigand is forced to defend his right to testify against the tobacco industry as a whole on the negative effects of nicotine, and he agrees to film a famous interview for "60 Minutes" in which he makes a very public confession about what he knows as a former tobacco scientist. Then the plot thickens: CBS Corporate is concerned about potential litigation and damages they'd have to pay to the tobacco industry if they were to air the original interview with Wigand, and executive producer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall, having a great year) is all but forced to buckle under the pressure from a high-heeled corporate succubus (Gina Gershon) and her feckless lacky (Stephen Tobolowsky). Soon, there's an "alternate version" being aired and Bergman and Wigand feel screwed over by the lack of integrity and strong moral fiber on behalf of "60 Minutes" and CBS. Michael Mann has become a masterful filmmaker when it comes to giving us absorbing and deeply involving epics with cool, austere style and terrific acting - see his modern opera of cops & robbers, "Heat" (1995). With this film, he tops himself, painting a broad and detailed, utterly involving portrait of a man whose very livelyhood was severely placed in jeopardy until justice prevailed and censorship and fear of liability from evil and vindictive corporations was quashed. Al Pacino is terrific as Lowell Bergman, the producer who simply wants to protect his source and get his story "out there," but is seemingly powerless in the face of syccophants who are willing to bend to the will of their corporate overlords and that of the highly questional tobacco industry. Russell Crowe is brilliant as Jeffrey Wigand, who becomes something of a posterboy for sticking by your guns and fighting for your rights against oppression, threats and censorship. Christopher Plummer provides a nice little portrait of Mike Wallace, a strong-willed and sharp-witted veteran who simply wants to do his job and do it well, and for whom - eventually - enough is enough. The film, as I hinted at before, has a great cool look thanks to the lush and gorgeous cinematography, made of 2.35:1 widescreen camerawork, largely handheld, with washed-out blue-green lighting, by Dante Spinotti. The film is unique in that it manages to run 157 minutes and span a rather long time, involves tons of information and complex plot maneuvers involving many characters, and yet we are never lost for very long, if at all. It is a credit to Mann and his co-writer Eric Roth, who adapted an aptly-titled article called "The Man Who Knew Too Much" by Marie Brenner, that they manage to absorb and export tons of facts, massaging the truth for dramatic purposes here and there, while more or less keeping the true story's integrity in tact, all the while expressing it in the form of a top-notch thriller. The film is smart, engaging, deeply moving, sometimes sardonically funny, and one of the year's best films.

    NOTE: The film was nominated for 7 Oscars including Actor (Crowe), Director, Cinematography, Editing, Adapted Screenplay and Picture.

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Critic Reviews

April 25, 2003
Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

Pumped up with sharp editing, vivid performances and a damning true story to tell, it's a morality tale with a hard contemporary punch. full review

May 8, 2001
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Mann turns a moral issue into riveting suspense. full review

January 1, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The film is accurate in its broad strokes. full review

January 1, 2000
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Pacino and Crowe are at their best, but the supporting cast also shines. full review

View more The Insider reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

Comments

  • os99
    November 22, 2007
    os99
    This is by far, Russell Crowe's best performance.
  • ladyp1964
    April 15, 2007
    ladyp1964
    I hope nobody actually answers the question below here on this page. It would ruin the film for anyone who wants to watch it.
  • made4you19
    April 1, 2007
    made4you19
    how does this movie end exactly..i didnt quite catch that. they did get the film on tv but wasnt that after some newspaper printed it firsst?? anyone know?
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  • For which movies was " Russell Crowe " won/nomitated for an academy award ?  Answer »
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