Krishna
But, told from a human angle, the story keeps our interest and the scintillating performances of the main characters adds to the feeling of having watched a good movie. There are no great action sequences or computer generated monsters to terrorize you or show you a different world. But the story displays the ugly underbelly of corporate greed and the buckling of intrepid and powerful media personalities to pressure applied at the right angle and at the right time. It is about idealism in journalism and how it sometimes can come up short against pressures of corporate reality.
The initial scenes are just set there to show the dynamism of the CBS media personalities. Lowel Bergman, the famous producer of CBS (played by Al Pacino) can do almost anything to get the news covered in all its true glory. He works with Mike Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer) who is so powerful that he can browbeat Hizbulla’s leader into submission about how close he should be sitting to the leader in an interview. They are idealistic, fearless, and are powerful even inside CBS, able to overrule corporate honchos normally in the pursuit of the ‘raw truth’.
When Bergman gets hold of unethical practices and subsequent false testimony on the part of some tobacco companies, the real story starts. Bergmen gets hold of Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crow), who has, he suspects, a secret that can tear the corporations apart and change the face of Big Tobacco in the US. But Wigand has been let go with very generous retirement plan just to keep his mouth shut.
Initially Wigand tells him that he will not talk about it. When his company chairman forces him to sign an expanded confidentiality agreement and threatens to remove all his perks, Wigand refuses and later tells Bergman that the CEOs of the tobacco companies perjured themselves in Congress.
When subsequently, his family is threatened by what he believes is his corporation, he decided to tell all. The tobacco companies get a court order from Kentucky (state order) that prohibits from giving testimony but he is in Mississippi and records the tape, knowing well that he may be arrested if he returned to Kentucky again. Mike Wallace interviews him and he tells the whole story. He finds that the price of standing up to the corporation when his wife, unable to deal with the pressures mounting, decides to leave him.
Bergman is stunned when CBS, and even his idol Wallace decide not to air the tape. He realizes that CBS has been pressured by Tobacco by possible threats of lawsuits into silence and he decides to expose the CBS story by going to a rival publication!
The story is told very well and the understated performance of Crow is in stunning contrast to the idealistic, fire breathing Al Pacino and the cocky, self assured portrait of Wallace by Plummer, who finally comes across as an old man desperately trying to hang on to the perks earned by sacrificing his lifelong ideas of truth and independence is great. The people are shows with all the issues and warts and therefore appear human. Wallace is not a pure as snow whistleblower – he has an anger control problem, he has jilted women in the past etc.
It is interesting to compare the character with the real life Russell Crow and also to see him as a blond man. In addition, the performance of gloomy, slightly confused character reminds one of his later brilliant performance in A Beautiful Mind three years later.
The story is well told and keeps your interest throughout. The dialogs are crisp, the characters true to life, and the story told cleanly. (The movie was based on a Vanity Fair piece called A Man Who Knew Too Much)
You come away with the feeling of having watched a good movie, one where the story is told intelligently, and is satisfying.
I would say a 7/10
– Krishna