Tag: Gina Gershon

The Insider (1999)

Mann’s finest film is a chilling breakdown of the insidious strength of corporations

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Dr Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Stephen Tobolowsky (Eric Kluster), Colm Feore (Richard Scruggs), Bruce McGill (Ron Motley), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Michael Gambon (Thomas Sandefur), Rip Torn (John Scanlon), Cliff Curtis (Sheikh Fadlallah)

For decades we persuaded ourselves smoking was problem-free. Then, when we finally decided sucking tar into your lungs several times a day probably didn’t go hand-in-hand with good health, Big Tobacco bent over backwards to argue they didn’t believe for one minute nicotine was actually addictive. This lie – they were improving the hit to increase the customer base – was blown upon by corporate whistle blower, and former B&W employee, Dr Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe).

But the battle over the reporting of the story also exposed the fault-lines in corporate-owned media companies, as Wigand’s 60 Minutes interview was canned by a CBS network terrified of legal action imperilling a corporate sale, much to the fury of crusading producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who spent months bringing Wigand in only to see him brushed aside. The Insider charts these two stories merging into each other: the deadly campaign of intimidation and smears against Wigand, segueing into the caving of CBS in the face of legal threats with Bergman left furious, betrayed and turning his campaigning fire against his own employers.

This all comes grippingly to life in Michael Mann’s superb slice of All the President’s Men inspired-reportage, turning this 1996 TV-and-business scandal into a sleek, intelligent thriller that takes a chilling look at how corporate America rigs the game in its own favour with impunity. The Insider is as rightfully furious at the dirty-tricks and menace of the tobacco companies, as it is at the subtly insidious way corporate interests pollutes news reporting. It does this while also presenting its two heroes as flawed men with more in common than they might think: competitive alpha males, both prone to taking rash, destructive actions in fits of head-strong self-righteousness, caring about their own moral code over the needs of others.

The Insider splits into two clear acts: the agonising decision of Wigand to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance, in the face of immense personal and professional pressure and Bergman’s subsequent struggle to deliver on his word and get Wigand’s confession on air. The first half offers the more traditional heroics – and the more overt hero-and-villain structure, but increasingly I find the second half, of news shows being dictated to by their paymasters more-and-more unsettlingly prescient, becoming increasingly relevant the older the film gets.

But that first half makes for a compellingly tense pressure-cooker view. It’s powered by an excellent performance by Russell Crowe (effortlessly convincing as someone twenty years older, and collecting his first Oscar nomination). Crowe makes Wigand principled but prickly, brave but confrontational and at times frustratingly self-righteous. His moral qualms are finally sharpened into action his fury at the blunt-intimidation from B&W’s sinisterly avuncular CEO (a masterful cameo from Michael Gambon – one of the great single-scene performances in movies) and its implication that he cannot trusted to stick to his NDA. Wigand barely involves his wife (a tightly-wound Diane Venora) in his decisions, only mentioning his dismissal in passing and deciding to appear on 60 minutes (a decision that will shatter their lives) unilaterally.

But Wigand also has higher motives. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye, having sold-out to burnish the dirty-deeds of B&W with his scientific skills. He’s rightly affronted by the lies Big Tobacco has sold the public and undergoes enormous sacrifices (financial, marital, professional, legal, death threats and a public smear campaign) to see things through. Mann’s cool mix of starkness and shadows, full of drained out colours and greys, is perfect for a world where Wigand is shadowed by strangers at a driving range, receives bullets in his mailbox and searches late at night for who has left footprints in his garden. Crowe superbly conveys a man acting out of an increasing sense of moral imperative, struggling desperately to hold himself together under immense pressure.

This section of the film – especially with its clear antagonist – plays as a superb personal and political thriller, Mann expertly conveying lurking menace. In 1999 the second half of the film, the struggle to actually broadcast Wigand’s interview, was often seen as slightly underwhelming. But actually it shows a different type of danger: less overt and heavy-handed corporate power with its legal injunctions and bullying FBI guys hoping for a cushy retirement job with the corporation, more how these corporate masters assert control in quiet, less direct ways to decide what we hear or see.

Our journalists have no fear when confronting criminals or terrorists – The Insider’s prologue establishes this with Bergman and host Mike Wallace not flinching in the face of gun-toting Hezbollah fighters guarding the Sheikh they have arranged to interview. But they face far greater threats to their integrity when confronted with lawyers and corporate directors (effectively embodied by Gina Gershon and Stephen Tobolowsky as uncaring suits) whose threats are indirect and insidious. Wigand’s interview could imperil the sale of CBS and the bonus of the corporate suits, and in that scenario journalist principles can go hang. Christopher Plummer is, by the way, superb as the charismatic Wallace, who caves to pressure then convinces himself he hasn’t, a super-star of the airwaves who loses part of his wider integrity trying to protect his position.

And doesn’t the idea that corporations can squeeze the life out of journalistic stories feel even more chilling today? After all, virtually every single news outlet out there is owned by a major business, all with their own agendas. Can we really believe they’ve not all made calls on gets reported, based on what their shareholders might think? Mann’s film skilfully – and rather chillingly – shows how quickly they can re-work the agenda. It leaves Lowell Bergman raging (as only Al Pacino can) against the betrayal of trust he’s being forced to make towards Wigand.

Crowe’s pressure-cooker performance stole many of the headlines on release but The Insider also benefits from an excellent Pacino performance. Utterly committed to his principles and – just like Wigand – utterly unwilling to compromise them even an inch, no matter the cost, Bergman will pick up the windmill-tilting banner, and charge with it at his own paymasters. No one can rip through speeches quite like Pacino, but he gives Bergman a real genuineness, grounded in a fundamental decency, whose righteous anger is underpinned with world-weary disbelief that it’s come to this.

It grounds an excellently studied breakdown of a journalistic turf war. The Insider plays like All the President’s Men, if Woodward and Bernstein had been spiked after they nailed the story. Mann demonstrates the influence in The Insider’s crisply immersive photography that employs depth of frame and gyroscopic deep-focus, as well as in the crisp editing and the film’s mesmerising emersion in the complex details of building a story. Combine that with a gripping conspiracy thriller on the machinations of ruthless corporations and The Insider makes for a compelling film.

The Player (1992)

Tim Robbins is the ultimate heartless Hollywood exec in Altman’s vicious satire The Player

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: Tim Robbins (Griffin Mill), Greta Scacchi (June Gudmundsdottir), Fred Ward (Walter Stuckel), Whoopi Goldberg (Detective Susan Avery), Peter Gallagher (Larry Levy), Brion James (Joel Levison), Cynthia Stevenson (Bonnie Sherow), Vincent D’Onofrio (David Kahane), Dean Stockwell (Andy Sivella), Richard E. Grant (Tom Oakley), Sydney Pollack (Dick Mellon), Lyle Lovett (Detective Paul DeLongpre), Gina Gershon (Whitney Gersh), Jeremy Piven (Steve Reeves)

Hollywood: it’s a hell of a place. Sharks ain’t got nothing on studio power-brokers, hunting product to sell. After all, not a single letter of “Art” appears in “Hollywood”. Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) hears 50,000 pitches a year and gives the green light to ten or twelve. Mill is plagued with death threats. Confronting the writer (Vincent D’Onofrio) he believes responsible, he kills him in a fight. Can he get away with murder and successfully romance the writer’s artist girlfriend June (Greta Scacchi)? And, even more importantly, can he protect his job from hotshot executive Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher)?

Robert Altman had been working outside of the studios for well over two decades after negative experiences creating his critically acclaimed but hard-to-digest masterpieces (including McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye, the sort of films only Altman could make). His career had drifted during the 1980s, as his edgy, ‘disciplined ill-discipline’ approach (with overlapping sound and roving cameras) moved out of fashion. The Player was not only his payback expose on the studio system, with the exec a sociopath, but also his triumphant comeback to the frontline of film-making (he earned several awards, including a nomination for Best Director).

The Player is nominally a comedy, but in the way of Altman it also fits half a dozen other labels: from film noir to corporate satire. Above all it’s a maverick’s view of a system designed to produce product (Mill constantly speak of his films like this – he would love our modern age of “content”). The studio’s offices are lined with posters from classic Hollywood – but the studio produces the most crowd-pleasing cookie cutter movies you can imagine. It’s all about squeezing in all the ideal elements a film must have: “Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.” (In a neat subversive twist, these are of course all present in The Player – but then it’s to be expected when what we are seeing might actually be a film within a film).

Film pitches all have an air of desperation, every idea boiled down to simple, easily digestible slogans. It’s nearly always a combination of two other films – “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!” – or involves the biggest stars (“Julia” and “Bruce” were those two stars – and both actors hilariously spoof themselves in the film’s climactic sequence). Ahead of its time, the film even features a pitch (from a cameoing Buck Henry) for The Graduate 2, a nostalgia tinted exploitation of the IP with all the original cast, that basically sounds like the sort of thing they’d actually make today.

There is no place for film-making as an art – any idea that can’t be compressed into 30 seconds is worthless. Mill’s knowledge of film is patchy at best, his attempt to make small talk about Bicycle Thieves boiling down to “Perhaps we should remake it?”. The film (possibly the film within a film within a film), Habeas Corpus, pitched by Richard E Grant’s pretentious writer (“No stars! No pat Hollywood endings!”) is only attractive because it has the wisp of Oscar about it (and Oscars mean Big Bucks). Even then, Mill plans to rework the whole film into exactly the sort of pat-Hollywood romantic thriller Grant’s character claims to hate (no character will support this decision more than Grant’s sellout writer). The only person who seems to actually watch films is Fred Ward’s studio head-of-security – and at least half of his references are met with blank incomprehension. When Griffin makes a speech donating the studio’s old films to a cultural library, his words about art and culture are incredibly hollow.

This vicious satire of the shallow culture of Hollywood – Larry Levy’s up and coming executive attends AA solely to network, not because he has a drink problem – is wrapped up in a beautiful noir framework, that’s brilliantly a few degrees off reality (for reasons that later become clear). Deluged by death threats from (he surmises) a disgruntled writer, Griffin meets the man he suspects – a pretentious holier-than-thou wannabe, played with chippy fury by Vincent D’Onofrio – who he beats to death in a neon-lit carpark, after a dig too far about Mill’s job security (as nothing threatens these guys more than the prospect of being drummed out of town).

Altman’s film wonderfully echoes the neon lit shadows of classic noir, while building a homage filled trap around Mill, desperate to escape punishment. Mill of course has killed the wrong man – and his stalker knows it – and his own heartless-but-effortlessly-cool business dealings are contrasted with his efforts to avoid the dogged pursuit of a police department (led, in a curious but just-about-effective piece of casting, by Whoopi Goldberg) correctly convinced he is guilty. The film asks, how much does morality intrude on Mill, when he’s led his whole life trampling people: isn’t literally killing someone only the next step up from all that metaphorical killing he’s been doing?

His one weakness is falling in love with his victim’s girlfriend, an artist played with a breezy sexiness by Greta Scacchi. Scacchi’s June is intriguingly unknowable – how much does she suspect Mill, and how much does she even care? – and the dance of seduction and suspicion between them is highly effective, culminating in a tastefully, imaginatively but highly sensually shot sex scene (built from Scacchi’s refusal to do a nude scene – instead the nudity comes from a full frontal of Robbins emerging from a mud bath).

Scacchi’s June feels like halfway between a real person and a movie construct – and that’s a deliberate effect in a film which, the ending suggests, may well have been a movie within a movie. Mill takes a pitch in the final moments from his actual blackmailer, who outlines the very film we have been watching, a pitch Mill accepts on condition the film (he?) gets a happy ending: cue Mill arriving home to June and the two of them using the same pat Hollywood pay-off lines to greet each other, we just saw Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts mouth in Mill’s happy-ending for Habeas Corpus. Apply the logic of a film to all the action and it suddenly makes sense on a whole new level, as a beautifully judged exploration of the very crowd-pleasing elements Mills praises, repackaged in a sharp and bitter satire.

Tim Robbins performance of restrained amorality is vital to the film’s success. In his career, any weakness is deadly – a mantra he applies to his interactions with the police and with June. Mill is so eerily controlled – fear is the only emotion he categorically shows, guilt never crosses his mind – you start to wonder if he even has a real personality. But, in the movie’s structure, he’s both a real person and also a construct whose life echoes scenes from the movies whose posters fill his office.

Altman balances these ideas of truth and reality perfectly within the studio satire. The film is astonishingly well-made, all Altman’s trademarks of overlapping dialogue and roving camera present and correct. It opens with a hugely confident seven-minute tracking shot around the studio, which feels like a real “I’m back!” statement – and is beautifully and wittily done. The film is crammed with dozens of celebrities playing themselves (they were given no dialogue and encouraged to improvise scenes), all of them keen to show they were in on the joke.

The Player is dark, witty and very clever, one of Altman’s sharpest and most enjoyable films. Crammed with echoes of film noir and a brutal expose of Hollywood business practice, it’s very well performed and keeps just enough lightness and humanity (it encourages to empathise, but not sympathise, with Mill, for all his amorality) to also be entertaining. One of the great films about Hollywood.

Face/Off (1997)

Nicolas Cage and John Travolta swop faces (yes really) in Face/Off

Director: John Woo

Cast: John Travolta (FBI Agent Sean Archer), Nicolas Cage (Castor Troy), Joan Allen (Eve Archer), Alessandro Nivola (Pollux Troy), Gina Gershon (Sasha Hassler), Dominique Swain (Jamie Archer), Nick Cassavetes (Dietrich Hassler), Harve Presnell (FBI Director Victor Lazarro), Colm Feore (Dr Malcolm Walsh), John Carroll Lynch (Guard Walton), CCH Pounder (Hollis Miller)

After five years, Sean Archer (John Travolta) has finally caught his nemesis, terrorist-for-hire Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage). But, with Castor in a coma, only his brother Pollux (Alessandro Nivola) – yup really – knows the location of the deadly bomb they planted in Los Angeles. With Pollux now in prison how can they get him to talk? Well obviously the easiest way is for Archer to undergo extensive, experimental surgery to alter his build, voice and (piece de resistance) have his face removed and replaced with Castor Troy’s. And of course, this should be top secret so no-one knows it happened. Because there is absolutely no chance Castor will wake up from his coma and have Archer’s face placed on his own head is there? But of course. Let the violent mayhem ensue, as Troy/Archer (Travolta) manipulates the FBI for his own ends and Archer/Troy (Cage) battles to reclaim his life and face.

Reading that, it won’t surprise you to hear that Face/Off is a hyper-reality film. Hailing from the 90s, when Hong Kong gun-fu director John Woo was seen as the auteur of action, every single thing is dialled up to eleven. Early in the film Archer is told that the voice-alterer attached to his vocal codes could be dislodged ‘by a violent cough’. Needless to say, it doesn’t shift once during the orgy of intense, balletic violence that follows, no matter how many times Archer/Troy flings himself through the air, guns blazing, or flips backwards to avoid bullets.

Face/Off it’s clear is a very silly film. It works, because it knows it is a very silly film. It dabbles only lightly in the psychological trauma of finding yourself in another body – and in Archer’s case not just any body, but the body of his son’s killer. But it’s less interested in that than in seeing the two actors have immense fun apeing each other’s intonations and mannerisms. Travolta in particular has a whale of a time as the id-like Troy/Archer, campily springing about the stage and good-naturedly mocking his own physique (“This ridiculous chin”), while prancing about with all the wide-eyed, giggling mania Cage has made his own.

In case you hadn’t worked it out in a film where faces can be swopped, nothing feels like it’s happening in the real world. Gun battles defy logic and physics. Archer’s obsessive pursuit of Troy in the film’s opening battle causes a jaw-dropping level of destruction, mayhem and death (in a real world, with his obvious psychological problems, he would have been off the case years ago). But then, he’s so reckless perhaps that’s why people don’t really notice when he’s replaced by Troy.

There are some interesting beats, many of them centred around Troy/Archer’s arrival in the Archer family home where he forms a superficial bond with Archer’s daughter (including saving her from assault from a creepy boyfriend) that, aside from his obvious insanity, perhaps things could be different (and there is a suggestion Troy/Archer plays with the idea of going straight – or at least a corrupt version of it). Joan Allen comes on board to add acting lustre as Archer’s doctor wife, so distant from her husband for years that she needs time to work out he’s been replaced.

But the film’s heart is in the violence. There are five or six action set-pieces that use every weapon in the Woo arsenal. Slow-mo? Check. Operatic grandness? Check. Walking with intent? Check. Diving forward while firing two guns? You betcha. Doves? But of course. Any real sense of logic is thrown out of the window, and really the film at heart is a comedy of two famous actors pretending to be each other, in between jumping at each other, screaming their heads off, practically making gun noises while they point their weapons, like maniac kids.

And, you know what? It works. Sure the entire enterprise feels very much of its time: and Face/Off captures Woo’s style so perfectly (with its huge body-count and reckless disregard for life and property) that he never topped it again. A director who basically could do one thing really well (future films would merely demonstrate his limitations), throwing himself into a film of intense silliness, with big-name stars having a whale of time and action set-pieces that make no real sense but are impressive to watch, he aces it here. Face/Off is an odd classic of its time, ludicrously silly but always choosing to double-down on its intense silliness – to gloriously entertaining effect.