The Insider (1999)'s activity - page 2

It's so hard to be a whistle blower that whistle blowers should stick together. And if that was the lesson of 1999's The Insider - based on the true events of 1995 surrounding the tobacco industry's criminal behavior - imagine how bad it is NOW. This is the kind of movie that would have Mark Ruffalo as the crusading journalist today, but Al Pacino will do, as a 60 Minutes producer at odds with CBS itself when corporate masters start protecting one another. The truth just isn't profitable enough. But as the the title suggests, this is really more about the whistle blower himself, played by Russell Crowe who was kind of in everything in this era, and how doing the right thing basically destroys his life. Though the movie sides with the "right thing", it's also a terrible warning against doing so. Michael Mann is at the helm and he tends to shoot everything as if it were a rain-soaked action film, which in this case counterbalances the potential dryness of the subject matter admirably. Dealing with an industry that's extremely litigious, you can sense a certain timidity in some quarters (like, why so many non-American actors?), but Mann doesn't let you feel it. It's possibly too long for its own good, but now 25 years removed from its release, I really enjoyed how it was placed very specifically in its time, with the 60 Minutes people talking about real news items, including the Oka Crisis over in Quebec, which dominated Canadian headlines if not American ones.