Word: filming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film focuses on Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, a research executive at Brown and Williamson, a tobacco company; he is wrongfully fired from his job and is soon courted by Lowell Bergman, a "60 Minutes" producer, about a possible tobacco-related story. Wigand is the highest-ranking tobacco insider to ever step forward; he knows every dirty little secret about what exactly companies put into cigarettes, and it's not pretty. Dogged by a confidentiality contract, Wigand is at first reluctant to talk; Bergman coaxes him into talking to "60 Minutes," in the interest of the health of the American people...
...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 third of the movie; the pacing is deliberate and slow, allowing the film to get under Wigand's skin and into his life...
...Crowe's Wigand is undoubtedly the body and soul of the film; Crowe plays Wigand like a modern Hamlet, a quiet, broken shell of a man, and endows him with incredible dignity and grace. In this quietly riveting performance, Crowe captures every nuance of his character's dilemma and slow collapse; he heartbreakingly portrays Wigand's paranoia, depression and bewilderment...
...With this film, Mann proves that he is at the top of his form as an actor's director. Mann's cameras work in intimate 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...
...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...