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Butting heads >> Will The Insider's take on the tobacco industry cause a public nic fit?
by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
Based on actual events, the film gives us a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the most highly rated news program in America dropped the ball on one of its most publicized stories. The Insider tells the story of Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), an ex-'60s radical now working as a 60 Minutes segment producer. After coming into contact with Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), an ex-tobacco industry suit, Bergman convinces him to divulge information about the industry's insidious internal dealings.
Wigand has first-hand knowledge of how tobacco companies, contrary to their official line, manipulate nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them more addictive. Yet despite Wigand and Bergman's efforts, the interview never airs because CBS is in the process of being sold to Westinghouse, and the threat of a billion dollar lawsuit from the tobacco industry could sour the deal.
Scenes of eloquent speechifying and explosive courtroom antics are foregone. What we get instead are ordinary people trying their best to do the right thing with what they are dealt. The fight to defend one's own integrity is presented in a compelling, cinematically exciting style.
While the network ends up looking spineless, 60 Minutes itself comes across quite well; but I'm left wondering just how often a major U.S. network producing an investigative journalism show would run into conflicts of interest. Think of NBC, owned by G.E., which has refused numerous times to run stories about the boycotts aimed at its parent company for its involvement in the nuclear weapons industry.
The Insider raises tough questions about the limits and possibility of a "free press" under the present system of corporately owned media. Beyond even that, it asks whether getting information to the public will actually change anything anyway, which in turn begs the question of what impact the film itself will have. Would Disney, the film's producer (as well as part-owner of ABC), bankroll a movie critical of corporately owned media unless it were a safe bet that nobody's going to care?
The Insider opens Friday, Nov. 5 |
The sight of tobacco CEOs perjuring themselves might be the century's defining image of corporate evil. And after seeing The Insider, smokers who can't seem to quit for health reasons might decide to quit for political ones.