Word: bergmans
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...life is threatened, his ex-employers hire thugs to stalk and scare him, and his wife leaves with their two daughters; he loses everything for a chance to set the record straight and doubts whether the price was worth it. Meanwhile, Bergman can't get Wigand's interview on the air at CBS; Don Hewitt and the corporate heads fear a multi-billion lawsuit from Brown and Williamson, and Bergman must plead with Hewitt and anchor Mike Wallace to get the ground-breaking interview on "60 Minutes." The loose, organic structure of the film works its magic in the first...
...Pacino's Lowell Bergman is unrelenting, highly moral, and loyal to Wigand during turbulent times. At first, Bergman's motives for courting Wigand seem a bit suspect and self-serving; there is an intriguing ambiguity to the character that is soon dropped and forgotten, much to the detriment of the character...
...closeness with his actors. And the cast works well with Mann's studied technique, which forces them into ultra-realism under the camera's close scrutiny. But the astonishing character study that dominates the first half begins to unravel when the film, inexplicably, changes its focus from Wigand to Bergman. Just as Wigand is entering his darkest period, becoming psychologically unhinged, the film cuts away to Bergman and his struggles with the brass at CBS. The heroic, moral air that builds up around Bergman in the last third almost suffocates the intricate and brilliant tale before it and threatens...
...greatest strength of the film is in its actors but in the last part of the film, Crowe's Wigand almost disappears, and Pacino's Bergman is given scenes full of moral posturing that are completely out of character. After weaving a difficult and astonishing narrative, Mann begins to lose the thread; he sacrifices complexity for black-and-white morality and substitutes shapeless confrontations for emotional depth...
...Before shooting The Insider, Michael Mann sent a draft of the screenplay to "60 Minutes" anchor Mike Wallace, who expressed concern about Mann's streamlining of actual events. Upset about being portrayed as floundering morally next to Bergman's shining knight, Wallace fumed, "oh, how fortunate I am to have Lowell Bergman's moral tutelage to point me down the shining path." Mann turned right around, and had Wallace's fictional counterpart spout the same line in his film...