The Insider (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

          2 hrs & 37 min, color, 1999

The making of a docudrama is quite a challenge.  I am speaking of a true story that demonstrates the old adage that fact can be, if not stranger than fiction, then at least as amazing and startling.  There are of course those movies that purport to be true but are little more than contrived tributes to factual persons or groups of persons.  This is especially the case when the tale told is cast in the form of a musical.  Al Jolson, Eddie Duchin, Glenn Miller, and the composing team of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, and several other show biz figures, have had the supposed stories of their lives emblazoned on the screen, but dig a little and you will find that at least 90% of the details portrayed come from the fertile mind of a Hollywood scriptwriter.  All of these above showy productions took great liberties in cleaning up the person’s act, making sure they came out smelling sweet for a family audience.  But just Google any one of them, and you will see just how phony the whole shebang really is.  “Based on the life of - !”  So the credits read.  Those two little words, “based on,” can mean nothing more than a faint suggestion of what might have been fact, if only, or what we would like to believe was fact.

A docudrama is something else.  It is a serious and concentrated attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about a living or historical subject or event.  It is not created in order to sell anything; it is not propaganda.  See how the word breaks down: docu - drama!  It falls somewhere between a newsy documentary and an entertaining but serious depiction.  A documentary is concerned with facts; a docudrama is concerned with truth.  It is an attempt at least to get at the truth by way of the facts.  Scenes and even characters are created out of the screen writer’s imagination “for dramatic purposes.”  But no attempt is made to clean up the undesirable elements.  Dialogue more inspired than the conversation that actually occurred can heighten the salient points in a historical reenactment.  These additions can give clearer definition to what was at stake in the course of events under examination. 

In my estimation “The Insider,” released in 1999, is a superb example of how to do it right, with honesty and integrity and with first rate film-making skill.  (“All the President’s Men” from 1976 is another.)  The quality screenplay, adapted from Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article “The Man Who Knew Too Much” is the work of Eric Roth and Michael Mann under Mann’s firm direction.  Russell Crowe plays Jeff Wigand, the biological chemist hired by the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company (manufacturer of Philip Morris Cigarettes) who, after he was fired, blew the whistle on the company’s insidious process of deliberately enhancing the addictive effect of its product.  He did this by way of an interview with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) on 60 Minutes in 1996, thereby taking the bold step of violating his severance agreement not to talk.  At first he resists opening his mouth to anyone in keeping with that gag order, but when Brown and Williamson starts tracking his every move and spying on him and attempting to add more severe conditions to the agreement, ones that are threatening to his wife and two little girls, he changes his mind and begins corresponding with CBS program supervisor Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and soon agrees to the interview with Wallace, after which his troubles and heartaches are just beginning.   

Oddly enough, it is not just the tobacco industry and its underhanded behavior that is scrutinized so much in this tense probe, but also television journalism itself and its ethical quandaries.  It seems that Bergman’s enrolling of Wigand into telling all gets him entangled in a dilemma of his own.  The top officials of the network balk at running the expose, once filmed, for fear of being sued by Wigand’s former employer.  When the other news people besides Bergman concur in the decision, thereby leaving Wigand hung out to dry, Bergman must use his wits to get the decision reversed and save Wigand from total despair, his marriage having already failed.   After the full interview is broadcast, Wigand is gratified to know that his children are able to learn why he had put them through all that crisis.  He then became a high school chemistry teacher, a job that led to other opportunities.

Questions are raised that defy easy answers – about free speech and privileged communication.  And they are handled in good taste, with excellent pacing.  The film may run a full two and a half hours, but it is inconceivable to me that any caring person would be bored.  Every scene without exception is gripping; there are no drags or lags.  And after fifteen years it remains quite relevant and contemporary.  We are still hearing much about the subject of tobacco’s addictive power and about efforts to lobby Congress to increase the excise tax on this product.  A recent editorial in the Washington Post took issue with those who feel that we should just let the long time smokers smoke themselves to death and concentrate on saving the younger crowd.  It maintained that lung cancer is a very real danger.  It kills people by very slow degrees.  My own father was “lucky” in that he was dead within less than three months after he was diagnosed.  Most victims are not so “lucky.”  When Humphrey Bogart was watched lighting up with his leading ladies in all those movies he made during the 1940s, few people knew at the time that those weeds were killing him.  He finally died a very horrible death in 1957.  If anyone wants to know how horrible, just let them read Lauren Bacall’s autobiography.  The good news:  Recent polls have shown that while in the 1950s a full half of the U.S. population were smokers, today less than one fifth are.  But the push stays on for reducing that figure far more.  And we all know now that smokers have become a segregated minority in public with smoke free public places. How sweet it is!  Wigand enjoys his share of the credit for that.

The movie benefits from three strong male performances, each one a sturdy example of the acting craft. 

Christopher Plummer does not attempt to imitate Mike Wallace’s manner of speech or reconstruct his personality.  Such an attempt would have been a fool’s errand.  But he does capture the man’s tenacity and unapologetic attack mode, smartly and cogently.  You can hear the spirit of the man at work, and that is enough.  The character we see can cut someone down in a few words when he picks up the scent of mendacity.  Plummer must have spent many hours watching footage of Wallace doing his thing.  Great supporting work!

Russell Crowe is magnificent in the shoes of Wigand.  He brings a lot of vulnerability and snap and controlled fury to the part.  The character he embodies can be a bit fast on the draw, but he can also seethe until tempered by the input of calmer individuals.  According to reports from those at the CBS network who have seen the film, his interpretation of Wigand is quite accurate.  This remains in my opinion his best work on screen.  Only “A Beautiful Mind” would compete for the honor.

Al Pacino as Bergman comes forth with another of his brassy, take-charge, no-nonsense depictions, combining sincerity and dedication to the art of journalism with the voice of rationality amidst pending calamity.  No one else I know of could handle that better.  His scenes with Crowe are letter perfect and tone perfect, two vastly different warriors trying to find a common strategy.  

Though her part is quite small, I need to put in a word for Diane Venora, who plays Wigand’s wife.  She does a splendid job, bringing her share of heart to the picture.  One of the most stirring moments is the one in which she announces to her husband that she is leaving him.  She does not stage an uproarious scene; she just simply confesses to him, meekly and tearfully, that “I don’t think I can do this.”  She knows she should stick with him, that a wife’s place is at her husband’s side in a crisis, but she has to back out.  This confession follows a death threat which she herself has read on their e-mail.  A little too much for her! 

There are many memorable moments of confrontation in this masterpiece.  I have seen it about a half a dozen times, and I hope to again.  It is easy enough to obtain from Netflix.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Book Review by Bob Racine

                         Published by Random House, 2013

After each reading of a John Grisham novel, I feel as if I have learned more about the law and the justice system in our country than any textbook or crash course for non-schooled adults could possibly teach me, and his latest work is no exception.  In fact, it is the most revealing I have ever taken the time to absorb, it being the ninth of his writings I have checked out.  As many of us know, Grisham is himself a lawyer.  When you follow the intricacies of any suspenseful plot he devises, you can rest assured that you are getting an accurate and authentic portrayal of how the court system operates.  His stories may be fictional, but they are not fanciful.  I suppose you can call Grisham’s books legal thrillers.  The devices of his principal characters in their struggles for justice and rectitude and legitimacy do not consist of firearms or martial arts or implements of cloak and dagger.  The system of jurisprudence itself is both the means of embattlement and the arena in which the embattlement occurs.  There are no white knights or flawless role models or Perry Mason-style practitioners.  All the persons he depicts are deeply flawed.  Some drink to excess and/or smoke to excess and/or bend the rules almost to the breaking point; all make mistakes, sometimes whoppers.  No one is lily white, not even the main character, Jake Brigance.

Do any of you Grisham fans recognize the name?  Jake put in his first appearance in the author’s first novel, “A Time to Kill.”  In that earlier work he is a trial lawyer in Ford County, Mississippi (fictitious of course) in 1985 defending a black man against a murder charge for killing the two white men who raped his daughter.  That was three years before the time setting of “Sycamore Row,” in which the litigation is not a murder trial but a contest over the legitimacy of a will handwritten by a man named Seth Hubbard just before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree.  It seems Seth has done something very odd and heretofore unheard of.  He has bequeathed 90% of a 24-plus-million dollar estate not to his two grown middle-aged children, but to his black housekeeper named Lettie.  In a death note that reaches Jake’s hands after the suicide has already taken place, Hubbard predicts that his relatives, all of whom he despises, completely cut out of the inheritance, will be greedily contesting its terms but urges Jake, whom Seth has chosen, to fight them all the way.  Lettie must prevail.  What complicates these seemingly clear instructions is the fact that over a year beforehand he made out an earlier one dividing his fortune between all of his offspring and their children, one that this new one is supposed to nullify completely.  Jake is faced with the task of serving the wishes of a man he has never met or seen in the flesh and proving that the second will is valid.    

The book has some length, quite a number of characters, and much of it portrays the maneuverings of the attorneys on both sides of the aisle.  The reader knows well ahead what each of them is up to and something about how they are plotting to establish that Seth either was or was not of sound enough mind to compose such a holographic document and only a day before he dispatched himself.  What seems at first a rather simple affair for Jake compared with the sensational murder trial of three years before is beset by complications piling one on top of the other until the outcome appears to be anything but a slam dunk. 

Jake is up against more than the greed of Seth’s relatives; there is chicanery right and left on the part of the lawyers for the family and Jake himself is not above a little maneuvering of his own.  In short, he needs the fees after a very dry season.  Over those previous three years business has been very sparse and because the Ku Klux Klan protested his defending a black person by burning down the house he and his wife Carla owned, he lost all his equity and has been renting a shabby small abode.  This will probate that has fallen into his hands promises to deliver him and his family from the financial doldrums, but there are rocks and shoals around which he must navigate.      

The stage is set for a marathon fight in the same courtroom where “A Time to Kill” takes place.  But the fight is entangled in many questions that no one including Jake can answer.   Why would a millionaire leave 90% of his assets to a housekeeper, something unheard of in a deep south community?  What influenced his decision?  The man was dying of cancer and in wretched pain.  Was his mind beclouded by the Demerol he was taking in such large quantities?  Did he really hate his children that much?  Did Lettie, who cared for him in the closing hours of his life and nursed him on his deathbed, use some feminine wiles to induce him into leaving her such an astronomical sum, one that no black person in the state owns or has ever owned?  What came over Seth?  And what dark secret out of Lettie’s past lurks in the shadows?  It is that dark secret, hidden even from her, that eventually breaks the case wide open.

The legal trajectory that slowly leads to the final courtroom confrontation I found absolutely enthralling.  It is perhaps unsettling for many readers to learn how so many rules governing jurisprudence are honored as much in the breach as in the observance, even by judges on the bench.  Consider these observations either from or about his characters that Grisham drops along the way: “[Legal] ethics are determined by what they catch you doing;”  “He was well versed in the ethics of his profession when they could be beneficial, otherwise he ignored them;”  “Trials are not about fairness – trials are about winning.”  The most fascinating of all is the sleight of hand by which the lawyers influence the selection of the jury.  (Of course, Grisham deals at even greater length with that subject in “The Runaway Jury,” one of the most exciting of his earlier works.)      

There are many and varied moving scenes depicted in this book.  Seth’s funeral gives new coloration to the term tragicomic.  Droves in attendance but no one present to grieve, only to keep up appearances with money on their minds or, as in the case of the county sheriff, to perform a duty and cover the scene.  Jake’s many off-the-record conversations with the judge are potent and most revealing about the delicate and slippery side of practicing law.  There is a very heartwarming sequence in which Grisham visits the Brigance household (including a 7-year-old daughter) on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.  There are conversations between husband and wife pertaining to the lifestyle forced upon them by Jake’s practice.  There is a subplot pertaining to Lettie’s drunkard husband and her wish to be free from him, one that ends quite tragically for him and for two innocent victims of vehicular homicide and almost puts a stain on Lettie’s reputation, something under these circumstances she does not need.  

All through the circuitous but well integrated narrative, we can pick up the sound and the rhythm of jackals circling their prey and with an appetite for conquest, and over against all this fury is the simple private person of Lettie reluctantly participating and apparently helpless against the onslaught and the front page publicity.  Even members of her extended family, whom she barely knows, come flocking around her hoping for a windfall from the expected inheritance.  In an area like Ford County, what are the chances of an unprecedented probate trial such as this grinding on without the issue of race raising its ugly head?  What are her chances up against the machinations of professional white attorneys eager to keep the money in white hands and collect handsomely themselves off a protracted litigation?  And whose hands can Lettie hold while the storm rages on?  One sentence in the novel sums up the crucial question: “After all the witnesses had testified, after all the lawyers had been silenced, after all the wise words had been uttered . . . could those [jurors] (ten of whom are white) reach deep and find the courage to uphold Seth’s will?”

5% of the fortune has been left to Seth’s local church and the other 5% to his brother Ancil, whose whereabouts are at first unknown and whom he has not seen or heard from in decades.  Without giving away the outcome of this tense narrative, I will simply say that Ancil, whom nobody is thinking about during the course of the proceedings, gets to deliver the stunning blow that tears the lid off the county’s shameful past.  The closing chapters of “Sycamore Row” had me in cathartic tears.  The heartfelt truth finally has the last, unwanted but cleansing word. 

Recommended for serious and probing adult readers with socio-political conscience and awareness!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.