The Insider
Smoke and Mirrors
One day, years from now, some intrepid chronicler will write the definitive book on the trial lawyers’ war against the tobacco companies. It will be the tale of a long, twilight struggle without heroes or honor or courage or any of the other things that ennoble the dirty little business we call war. It will be a tale of unbridled greed, cynicism and callous disregard for the rule of law and the good of the public. And it will be a classic tale of evasion, bad faith, and failure to accept responsibility, eclipsed in this decade only by the sad and sorry case of the Clinton Impeachment.
The Insider is not that story. It purports to be the tale of two men, a reporter and a scientist, caught in the crossfire of brickbats thrown between the two opposing camps. Al Pacino is the reporter — a “60 Minutes” producer, to be accurate — who is seeking out scandal in the tobacco industry. Russell Crowe is Jeff Wigand, a research executive at Brown & Williamson, fired for proposing changes to B&W cigarettes to make them less addictive and less carcinogenic. The Insider is their heroic attempt to expose those evil, awful, suit-wearing blowhards of Big Tobacco as phony nicotine-peddling sleazebags.
Wigand knows the secrets of Big Tobacco; knows how they increase nicotine content and add ammonia and other chemicals to speed the path of the drug to the brain. However, he’s signed a confidentiality agreement which bars him from revealing these secrets; failure to keep this agreement leads to the loss of his severance pay and his family’s health insurance. Nevertheless, he wants to blow the whistle on the unethical acts of B&W, wants to get back at the company that unceremoniously dumped him… and Pacino wants him to do it on 60 Minutes despite the potential cost to his career.
If you buy the premise, I suppose, The Insider is a lot of fun; two renegades trying to beat the system, or, if you like, Erin Brockovich without the short skirts. I didn’t, and don’t, and here’s why: When we see Wigand for the first time, he is cleaning out his desk and driving home. As he pulls into his upscale suburban sidestreet, we see that he is driving an Audi. Well, when I saw that, I about fell out of my seat, trying hard to stifle a horselaugh.
The Wigand affair is accurately presented by The Insider as a low point in the history of 60 Minutes, but it is not the lowest point. Some years before the events in this movie, Ed Bradley aired a segment focusing on what he termed “sudden acceleration syndrome”, the worrisome tendency of Audis to suddenly launch themselves into brick walls or oncoming traffic or what have you, causing injuries to drivers and passersby. 60 Minutes even showed a scientific test simulating how engine pressure could overpower even the most careful driver and cause the Audi to lose control and slam into solid objects at high rates of speed.
A classic 60 Minutes expose, correct? Wrong. It turned out that:
- The test had been rigged, with Bradley’s car expert supplying the “engine pressure” from a bottle;
- The whole story came about because of a too-cozy relationship between the “60 Minutes” producer and the trial lawyer seeking to gather plaintiffs for a massive class-action against Audi.
- Please see Peter Huber’s masterful “Galileo’s Revenge” for the details.
Despite the acting skills of Crowe and Pacino, The Insider is little more than a brief for the defense. It portrays the tobacco industry in the worst possible light. Whenever someone involved with tobacco is onscreen, he is making either a direct or oblique threat directed at Wigand, or he is testifying before Congress about how tobacco is non-addicting. The latter, a dramatization of actual testimony, is repeated over and over again; it’s The Insider’s touchstone.
Of course, what gets lost in this moment is this: the tobacco industry folks who were ordered to appear before Congress were caught in a bit of a dilemma. If they told the truth — that nicotine was an addictive drug, something everyone already knew — it would inevitably be used against them in every class-action trial brought by every Armani-wearing trial lawyer in the country who wanted to upgrade the Suburban to a Range Rover; not to mention that the FDA would take the opportunity to strangle the tobacco industry in its voracious, entangling regulatory grasp. (When it was President Clinton in this situation, his defenders called it a “perjury trap”.)
I am not saying the tobacco industry are angels of sweetness and light. I have no doubt that the destruction of Jeff Wigand’s life happened much as described. What I am saying is that The Insider tells only the side of the story that it wants to. It all but canonizes Pacino’s sleazy left-wing radical reporter character. It gives Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore, who started the state lawsuits against the tobacco industry, a walk-on part as himself (where he gets to show his sincere side), while it only briefly touches on the personality of the other trial lawyers, while assigning to them the purest of motives.
Like I said, if you buy into the premise, The Insider can be a lot of fun. If you have your doubts, though, the whole thing can be an excruciating experience, especially if really, deep deep down in a place you don’t want to talk about, you really, really don’t care about internal politics at 60 Minutes. That’s about all the last third of the movie covers, and I had to jab myself in the thigh with a ballpoint pen just to stay awake.
The only good part of the movie was the previews, where newly-minted Academy Award nominee Russell Crowe showed up in the preview for Gladiator. One only hopes that in that movie, he won’t say that the Surgeon General has shown that fighting tigers to the death is hazardous to your health. Or at least not in the same way that The Insider is a hazard to your sanity.