Few directors can take a muckraking dramatization of real life potentially dusty legal shenanigans and news gathering and make it so chest convulsively taut that the blood in your ears pounds, but Michael Mann is one of them (an honorable mention to Tony Gilroy’s fictional corporate muckraking thriller, Michael Clayton). Based on Marie Brenner’s 1996 Vanity Fair article “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” The Insider is the tale of Jeffrey Wigand, a former Brown & Williamson chemist turned whistleblower who takes on the tobacco industry. With a script by Mann and Eric Roth, the film stars Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.
It was a ripped-from-the-headlines story at the time, but it also captured unsettling truths about the corporate control of media that seem chillingly prescient today. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe.
Mann and his cinematographer, Dante Spinotti (Heat, The Last of the Mohicans), capture breathtaking images, from perilous nighttime scenes at a golf driving range to a bucolic backyard picnic, and imbue them with dramatic meaning. Nevertheless, The Insider is a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat, not because of lurid revelations or shock-twists but because of its compelling characters and the tension between them. And that is what sets it apart from other movies in its genre.