Dissecting a Scene from The Insider: redux

Ten years ago, I broke down this scene from Michael Mann's masterpiece "The Insider" (1999) shot by shot. It's a scene in which 60 Minutes producers Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) and consummate correspondent Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) are called into a meeting with the President of their CBS News division, Eric Kluster (Stephen Tobolowsky), and CBS general counsel Helen Caperelli (Gina Gershon) to answer questions about their exposé with the ultimate insider, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), ex-employee of Brown & Williamson Tobacco who accuses his former bosses of consciously ignoring health considerations. I posted this at a moment in time, July 2016, when the notion of truth was becoming ever more specious and I was truly beginning to sense what was coming for the United States. In the decade since, both the scene and the movie have proven frighteningly prescient. Given what is currently transpiring with 60 Minutes and CBS News and its kowtower in chief, it is proving prescient again. So, I dusted it off and reposted it with just a few minor tweaks. 

This is how the scene is established, with Bergman and Wallace in cozy, laugh-filled consultation while their executive producer, Hewitt, sits one chair over. This is a Bergman & Wallace world, see, until.....

Caperelli enters with a cheerful countenance by asking "Should I send for coffee?", the obligatory faux-peace offering in corporate conference room settings before figurative shots are fired. 

She sits, along with Kluster to her right, while Bergman and Wallace disengage, still smiling, still in their own little world.

Notice how Gershon has Caperelli lean toward Wallace, Bergman and Hewitt, a subtle shift into attack mode. "I thought we'd get together because there's a legal concept that has been getting some new attention recently, 'tortious interference.'"

In saying "tortious interference", Hall has Hewitt snap to attention, like, 'Oh, this doesn't sound good.'

But in the ensuing wider shot, compare Hewitt's reaction with what Pacino has Bergman do in the face of "tortious interference" - utter disinterest, like, 'Oh, some more corporate b.s..' 

Caperelli explains that corporate b.s. "If two people have an agreement, like a confidentiality agreement, and one of them breaks it because they are induced to do so by a third party..." and on third party Gershon has Caperelli point right at Wallace as a thinly veiled accusation, telling them if stuff happens, this is their fault. 

Upon concluding her spiel, Bergman and Wallace take turns explaining that they air something only if it's in the public interest, and only after they verify and corroborate it, which is why, as Wallace notes, they "have never lost a lawsuit and run a classy show." And Plummer caps his little lecture with an "Anything else?" that is laugh-out-loud haughty.

Ah, but there is so much else, because even if Caperelli agrees that 60 Minutes has exacting verification standards, she thinks it wouldn't hurt to "make sure you're right on this one." 

Hewitt asks Kluster, his boss, what the CBS News position is on this issue. 

And as the CBS News President goes to answer, he looks first to Caperelli for approval, signaling the hierarchy. 

And Caperelli takes the baton, explaining that they must check on this claim of tortious interference before they air the piece.

And as she explains this, Plummer has Wallace look at her like her reasons aren't worth the gum on his shoe.

But now Caperelli turns the threats from an outside party to her own, terming the segment "already rife with problems", and opening a binder as she says to visually underscore the supposed rifeness.

Now she has Bergman's attention. "What does that mean?"

"'Rife with?'" Bergman repeats as he leans forward, readying for conference room battle.

Off camera, she explains to Bergman that "unusual promises" were made to their client, which Bergman immediately disputes by saying they merely agreed to hold his story until it was ready to air.

She questions Wigand's veracity.

Bergman explains Wigand's veracity was good enough for the whole state of Mississippi.

Caperelli explains that their "standards have to be higher than anyone else's because we are the standard for everyone else." 

"As a standard, I'll hang with, 'Is this guy telling the truth?'"

Gershon's smirk is the wicked rebuttal to the quaint notion of "telling the truth", which her character then explicates further. "Well, with tortious interference, the greater the truth, the greater the damage. They own the information he's disclosing. The truer it is, the greater the damage to them. If he lied, he didn't disclose their information. And the damages are smaller."

Here, in fact, is where Pacino should have won the Oscar. Confronted with the idea that telling the truth gets you into more trouble than telling lies, Pacino has Bergman pause and look around the room, a moment that cannot be fully captured in a screenshot, as if he can't believe here is here and now is now. He asks: "Is this Alice in Wonderland?"

Plummer has Wallace lean forward, quickly, like he's just seized on what he only just realized is the key to the whole case, his interviewing instincts having kicked in. "You said," he says, referring to the earlier statement made by Caperelli (see ninth screenshot), "'on this one.' What about this one?"

She explains that if they air the segment then Brown & Williamson could sue CBS. "At the end of the day, because of your segment, Brown & Williamson could own CBS." And she tops it off not with an expression conveying threat, but this expression, one that communicates a kind of "Aw shucks, if your segment was the reason for all this, gee, wouldn't that suck for your reputations?"

And Pacino has Bergman look not at Caperelli but at Wallace, as if he knows matters of "reputation" are what gnaw at Wallace like nothing else.

Caperelli's wristwatch bloops, her scheduled out. "I'm due upstairs," she says.

You can't see it in the still because it's almost imperceptible, but at what is obviously Caperelli's pre-arranged out, Pacino, brilliantly, has Bergman nod, like he's saying 'Of course.' 

Caperelli tells them not to rush to any conclusions because, hey, "We're all CBS."

And as she says, "We're all CBS", Mann's handheld camera drifts ever so slightly to the left, to allow space for the CBS "Eye" to enter the frame, as if the "Eye" is watching Caperelli who is watching everyone else.

Then, Caperelli dissolves, as if into a cloud of smoke, like she was never there.

Wallace tells Bergman not to worry, and Plummer gives Pacino a pat on the hand, momentarily reverting to their jocular behavior at the scene's start. "We call the shots around here," Wallace says. 

But Bergman knows that's not true. At least, not anymore, not after today, not from this moment forward. He wins, eventually, of course, he has to, he's the movie's hero, but not really, and he knows it. He gets the truth out, but the notion of truth has been compromised. "What got broken here," he says at the end, "doesn't go back together." This is the moment when it's broken.

Notes on Colbert, CBS, and the Paramount-Skydance Merger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbGqeyemofU

In Memoriam: Christopher Plummer

Michael Mann’s “The Insider” (1999), which was remarkable upon its release and yet somehow still grows better, deeper, and more resonant with each passing year, was mostly about two real-life men, Brown & Williamson whistleblower Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who fought to get Wigand’s story on the air, the former sort of passing the narrative baton to the latter midway through the movie. Hovering on the edge of both these stories, however, was famed journalist Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), interviewing Wigand for the story and serving as something akin to Bergman’s consigliere. 

In his performance, Plummer took a cue from the first scene, interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, where he argues with the Sheikh’s bodyguard to, in his own words, get his heart started. If it suggests an aging man, or deception, what it really foreshadows is this: theatricality. There is an air of performance to everything Plummer does in the part, gliding into a crowded Manhattan restaurant and basking in the glow of everyone who recognizes this prominent reporter, holding his reading glasses in his hand with a conspicuously studied air. Look at the moment when he settles in before a TV in a CBS hallway to watch himself give an interview to the Evening News; there is something he does there with his face, assuming this almost disquisitive expression, as if he is preparing to appraise his own performance. If there is a tendency in playing parts of famous people to sort of play it like you don’t know who you’re playing, like Henry Fonda playing just some chump from Illinois, Plummer goes the other way, playing Mike Wallace as Mike Wallace. That’s why Mann’s original desire to have Mike Wallace play himself would have been all wrong, like Kramer wanting to play Kramer on “Jerry”; Plummer could stand outside Wallace and see him for what he was. 

When Bergman first convenes a council to discuss bringing Wigand’s story to air by having him break his confidentiality agreement, others in the powwow see this as an impossibility. Not Wallace.   

“He’s got a corporate secrecy agreement? Give me a break. This is a public-health issue, like an unsafe airframe on a passenger jet or some company dumping cyanide into the East River. He can talk, we can air it.They’ve got no right to hide behind a corporate agreement. Pass the milk.”

It’s an astonishing moment, Plummer running that pass the milk on there without so much as a beat, as if he goes straight from delivering a monologue on a ledge to pouring a cup of damn coffee in the kitchen. And that’s what Plummer does in the role, somehow exist on two planes at all times. You see it especially in his show-stopping dressing down of Helen Caperelli (Gina Gershon), the face of CBS Corporate, where he masterfully amalgamates the seemingly incompatible notions of vanity and journalistic integrity, rendering a human being while still standing there and looking larger than life. More than most movie (more than any movies?), “The Insider” shows how our flaws and warts and selfish desires do not necessarily preclude us from knowing the difference between right and wrong. In his performance, Plummer lived it. 

Christopher Plummer died on Friday. He was 91.

Some Drivel On...The Insider

When the research scientist giving 1999’s stone cold masterpiece “The Insider” its title, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), is laid off from his job at tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, director Michael Mann recounts this moment not explicitly through dialogue – “You’re fired”, or some such – but by a series of simple cuts. As Wigand boxes up items in his office, we see, through the reflective tint of his glasses, co-workers, or ex-co-workers, in white lab coats mingling with cake outside his office window. Mann then switches to a reverse shot of Wigand seen through his office window so we can hear the low din of the people mingling, that noise deliberately playing off the eerie silence of Wigand’s office. This moment speaks not only to whatever Wigand’s vaguely defined role was – “the work I was supposed to do might have had some positive effect,” he says later – but to his emergent role as a whistleblower, and the lonely road he will trod in calling out his Brown & Williamson cohorts for peddling a deliberately addictive product. These people out here, by shutting up and going along, they get to have their cake and eat it too; this guy in here, he gets told to box up his shit and hit the road.

I’d be lying if I said “The Insider” wasn’t on my mind because of the whistleblower currently in the news, but then “The Insider” has been on my mind a lot in the last 3 years, it and its scintillating exploration of the truth, and all that the truth entails, less Black & White than Bitter & Murky, embodied in that phone call Wigand fields from Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the 60 Minutes producer who has gone to great lengths to amplify his whistleblowing through a TV segment where Wigand will confirm that 1.) The Brown & Williamson CEO lied under oath when he said nicotine was not addictive because 2.) Nicotine is absolutely manufactured to be addictive. With Bergman questioning details of Wigand’s past being fed to the press by Brown & Williamson as part of a deflective smear campaign, Wigand defiantly intones: “I told the truth.” Bergman explodes: “That’s not the fucking point, whether you told the truth or not!” And when Wigand repeats “I told the truth”, Crowe lets all the defiance out, a variation in line reading evoking how The Truth can look different refracted through a different light, not simply “the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality”, per Merriam-Webster, but something, improbably, depressingly, more malleable.

Crowe carries that truth with him in his performance, a nigh permanent tight-lipped expression embodying the facts he can choose to emit and a kind of hunched-over walk evoking the burden on his back. This burden is brought home in the sequence where, through Bergman’s finagling, Wigand goes to Mississippi to testify in a lawsuit against Big Tobacco to put what he knows on the public record to wrestle free of his confidentiality agreement. He is told, though, by one of the Mississippi attornies, Scruggs (Colm Feore), about a B&W gag order in the state of Kentucky, meaning that despite being free to testify here, back home he can be found in contempt and put in jail. “How does one go to jail?” Wigand asks, reciting his litany of family responsibilities. The ensuing scene, in which he debates what to do, only looms larger in my mind with each passing year, a masterwork of acting, editing, composition, and narrative, leaving out so much and still saying everything.

Outside Scruggs’s home, overlooking the Gulf, we see Bergman, on the left, and Wigand, on the right, from behind, the former telling the latter he heard about the gag order.

“I don’t know what to do,” Wigand says to Bergman.

And then Wigand walks off, away from Bergman, pointedly alone, underscoring The Whistleblower’s place in the world.

Then, Mann cuts away from the Gulf and outside the courtroom where the car carrying one of Wigand’s other attornies, Ron Motley (Bruce McGill), pulls to a stop.

Motely gets out-

A walk that Mann tracks with in this shot, McGill’s head-up, full-speed-ahead walk juxtaposed against Wigand’s more mournful gait.

And then Motely disappears into the press scrum.

Mann cuts back to Wigand, the gently lapping waves a pointed contrast to the cacophony of the media hollering at Motley while simultaneously reminding us that everything that may or may not happen in that courtroom hinges on what his decision.

Indeed, in the very next shot we return to the courtroom as Motley enters.

And as he does, the attorney for Big Tobacco looks up, as does everyone behind him, including the attorney for the Brown & Williamson CEO, the one guy standing up, played by Gary Sandy, who, in just a couple scenes, gives a great performance of smug dickitude, which you can see in his expression here, an impeccable “Well I’ll be, this motherfucker showed” cocky grin.

And the lead attorney leans toward a colleague to ask him to ask Motley if his client – that is, Wigand – plans to show too, illuminating the tension.

Back to the Wigand, seen from afar, trudging in that hunched-over walk, still lost in thought.

He returns to Bergman, now joined by Scruggs.

“I can’t seem to find the criteria to decide,” he says to Bergman. “It’s too big a decision to make without being resolved in my own mind.”

“Maybe things have changed,” Bergman offers.

And then Wigand turns back around-

-leading directly to the most transcendent of all Michael Mann motifs, staring into the distance, tantalized for a moment by the end of all complication. 

And then he turns back around, lingering for a moment on the police presence, as if ruminating on his present place in the world.

Wigand says: “What’s changed?”

“You mean since this morning?” Bergman asks.

“No,” Wigand says, “I mean since whenever.”

And though you can’t see in the screenshot (it is, after all, a motion picture), Pacino has Bergman quietly fall back in his posture, like he’s been blown back by the weight of these words.

And then Mann cuts back to Wigand, but from the side rather than over-the-shoulder, emphasizing that this moment, this decision, is his. He says: “Fuck it. Let’s go to court.”

And this...well, this might as well be me. Because that’s how I feel every time I think of this moment, like I can hardly believe it. That’s “What’s Changed?” does so much work here, suggesting that the context, personal or otherwise, stands entirely apart from the simple fact of the matter. Would that it were so simple. Rewatching it this week brought me to a few tears.

In another movie, that would be the end, or the beginning of the end. Wigand would go to court and McGill as Motley would give that breathtaking soliloquy shutting the Tobacco goobahs down, and Wigand would give his truthful testimony – “It produces a physiological response, which meets the definition of a drug” – and he and Bergman would enjoy triumphant cocktails. But that’s not the end. That’s hardly the start. If Wigand has told the truth, and if we are practically raised from birth to believe that so long as you tell the truth everything will be set right, well, to quote Christopher Plummer’s version of 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace, “Get in the real world.” The notion of the truth as something less than fixed is evinced by Gina Gershon’s CBS lawyer, a scene I’ve broken down in depth, where she explains Wigand’s veracity is, in fact, an issue, not an elixir, constrained by his factualness, a moment as comical as it is sad as it is WTF. And so CBS Corporate is constrained by Brown & Williamson, and CBS News is constrained by CBS Corporate, capitalism v journalism, the most ancient American grudge match, transforming the back half of “The Insider” into a journalistic thriller. Not one in which Bergman tries to get the truth, obviously, a la “All the President’s Men”, because he already has it, plain as day, but tries but tries to get the truth out to the people, which proves even more difficult.

Spoiler Alert: he does get the truth out, leaking Wigand’s Mississippi deposition to the press, putting the truth in print, spurring the process to where 60 Minutes can, finally unconstrained, air their Wigand story in full. You see Bergman watching this piece air from an airport bar, though Pacino emits an air not of elation but exhaustion from having moved such figurative mountains simply so that everyone surrounding him in the shot also turned toward the TV can hear Wigand blow the whistle. This suggests victory, echoed in Bergman’s wife (Lindsay Crouse) telling him “You won”, though the tone Mann ultimately strikes is more dirge-like, both in the accompanying Lisa Gerrard/Pieter Bourke score to Bergman responding, “Yeah? What’d I win?” In the following scene, when he steps down from 60 Minutes, Bergman tells Mike Wallace, revealingly, “What got broken here doesn’t go back together again.”

Mann is not belittling what Wigand has done, mind you, but rather holding it up as a last stand, the final gasp of an ideal. “The Insider”, I realize more and more with each passing year, is an elegy for the truth.