Review Tales

Man, 1999! If the 70s was the best decade for film, the 80s had the best aesthetics and synths, 1999 was and remains the best year for cinema! 

You had The Matrix….Eyes Wide Shut…The Iron Giant…Fight Club….Being John Malkovich…Toy Story 2…Magnolia….The Talented Mr Ripley….American Beauty….American Pie….Existenz….Election…The Blair Witch Project….The Sixth Sense….Office Space…Cruel Intentions….The Mummy…Bringing Out The Dead…..The Green Mile….Any Given Sunday….Stuart Little….The Virgin Suicides….Tarzan….Deep Blue Sea….The Thomas Crown Affair….10 Things I Hate About You….Girl Interrupted….Summer of Sam…..even Phantom Menance deserves a mention for being the most anticipated commodity before Cyberpunk 2077 – both of course ended up being fundamental disappointments lol! 

What about TV? The first seasons of The Sopranos, Spongebob Squarepants, Malcolm In The Middle…..1999 was just extra! How many original stories can you single out in 1999? How many exciting new voices came out that year? How many modern classics? How many underrated gems? How much cultural impact? Nothing tops this year! 

So the one film that I think deserves to be as fondly remembered, but for whatever reason didn’t make the splash it should have, is Michael Mann’s captivating investigative thriller The Insider. 

It blows my mind how an entire generation were sold cigarettes as a lifestyle. Scientists well aware of what nicotine meant, actually got bribed by corporate America to downplay its severity. Big Tobacco might be the most normalised of organised crime. But the film isn’t content to end there. Mann is more interested in how far can you push someone to betray their conscience; what is the true cost of silence. And what even is the point of investigative journalism if they’re scared of the truth! Remember how drama was putting complex characters in morally grey areas and tense situations? I miss that, let’s make more of that, Hollywood!

“I’m running out of heroes, man. Guys like you are in short supply”

Al Pacino does his weathered Middleaged Pacinoisms as Bergman, but you can feel the toll this case takes on him. You might mistake Bergman for a blasé journalist but he lives and dies on his word no matter the rules of the game. However it’s Russell Crowe as whistle blower Wigand (apparently the real Wigand hates being labelled as a whistleblower) who steals the show. Crowe has always struck me as a man who can do serious damage and receive serious damage. I always get this ticking time bomb effect whenever his character’s eyes wander off…..I’m scared for him and for anyone else in the room, coz shit’s about to go down. 

The moment where someone leaves a bullet in Wigand’s mailbox is the most violent thing I’ve seen in a Michael Mann film (that includes Heat‘s bank robbery shootout). I don’t doubt that it never happened to the real Wigand, but the simplicity of the threat, the powerlessness of the situation, it gives me chills typing it now. Just the way Wigand’s past flaws are used by the Tobacco company to smear his credibility……feels so prescient now when you see conservative media paint unarmed civilians shot by the police as “well he/she was no saint”; digging up any minor past indiscretions to change the narrative!

Mann cranks moral pressure, ethical dilemma and invasive paranoia to almost unpleasant extremes, while collapsing the spaces characters inhabit — beaches, newsrooms, hotel bedrooms — into eruptions of subliminal emotion. Adapted from Marie Brenner’s “Vanity Fair” article, Eric Roth’s screenplay is exceptional; it is for my money one of the best acted Hollywood thrillers of the past 30 years.

I’m not even bothered anymore by how below radar this film went! In a year this loud and attention grabbing, such a gem would have gotten lost in the echo. When I think of a proper “important drama” of 1999 that should have won the 5 main Oscar slots, I’m not thinking of American Beauty, I’m thinking The Insider – the latter has clearly held up the most. Maybe it’s better that it went unnoticed, lest it’d be labelled as “Oscar bait”.