The Insider (1999)

The original 60 Minutes interview

Did Christopher Plummer ever work with Eric Porter?

How Christopher Plummer did NOT get nominated for Mike Wallace still baffles the hell out of me.

Very well directed and acted. I loved Pacino in this.

Such a great studio film that doesn't get made today.

Mike?

R4 I agree. It is one of my favorite movies.

The cast is perfect- Pacino, Crowe, Plummer, Hall, Verona, and oddly Michael Gambon as Thomas Sandefur.

Masterpiece. I love this film. Nice to see it get some love here on DL.

Link to the film

I thought Russell Crowe was really TERRIBLE in this film, grunting all of his lines like Brando.

Bruce McGill steals the whole film with only a few minutes of screen time, and that’s not a slight to the excellent cast. In retrospect, Crowe might be a little overrated for the film, and Pacino underrated.

Bruce McGill showcase!

That's odd to hear. I think it's Crowe's very best performance. He played him almost awkward and nerdy.

R13, I only say that Crowe is a little bit overrated because so much of the praise was for the surface-level transformation from the person people knew as the L.A. Confidential hunk. He does great work in the movie.

I sometimes feel like my judgment of Crowe is just really off. I don’t love his most acclaimed roles as much as other people do, and yet I feel he’s undervalued for so many of his other performances. It feels like cheap contrarianism to say “Yeah, people think he’s great in A Beautiful Mind, but have you seen him in The Nice Guys?” and yet I’ll stand by it.

This is a very good movie. I haven't watched it in while. Thanks to the person above who posted the 60 minutes interview. I'd never watched it before.

I think it is Crowe's best performance

And Pacino's best performance (besides Godfather Part II)

And Plummer's best performance

And Gambon's best performance

And Verona's best performance'

And Baker Hall's best performance

The horrid handheld cam ruined this film.

I remember this movie being so acclaimed back in the late 90s but it's barely talked about today.

What R16 said. Everyone at the top of their game. A brilliant film.

R17 handheld camera?

To think Lady Kevin Spacey's flaming performance attempting to believably play a husband lusting after a teenager beat out Crowe's blistering taut work. I always assumed the Gladiator Oscar the following year was in large part due to that loss. I thought Tom Wilkinson's devastating performance in In The Bedroom was superior that year.

Believe me, Kevin had plenty of heterosexual lust to channel in that horned-up performance!!

La Spacey's performance in American Beauty reads like an offshoot of his performance in The Ref. He seemed to only be able to play husbands at odds with their wife. He plays them like Jodie plays single mothers. Jodie's single/divorced mothers always to me like a late in life lesbian who got tired of pretending and moved on.

Great movie that I used to coerce my then boyfriend to stop smoking. I told him it was a great courtroom movie (as he was studying for the bar) but not that it was about tobacco. I think that pissed him off a bit but he loved the movie and it started the looooooong process of him quitting the cancer stick even though there were many bumps on that road over the years. What eventually did the trick was seeing his chain smoker brother-in-law dying of lung cancer at age 39.

As good as he may have been in it, this was also an excuse for Crowe to get fat.

A fantastic film.

R6 My favorite scene.

Unfortunately it is not streaming anywhere

Pacino and Crowe should have been double nominees and a great argument for a tie win. Easily my winner for adapted screenplay, editing, supporting actor for Plummer and direction for Mann.

R29 And Plummer should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. The nominees that year were:

Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules (the winner)

Tom Cruise in Magnolia

Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile

Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley

Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense

I think Plummer would have won

Fantastic movie. That soundtrack!

A pretty good movie; but a thriller?

R32 It is a thriller

Like "All the President's Men," "The Insider" builds a lot of suspense, even though you probably already know how it ended in real life.

[quote] I always assumed the Gladiator Oscar the following year was in large part due to that loss.

I recall that being the general consensus at the time. Not that he wasn't good in Gladiator, but it wasn't a knockout performance like this was.

[quote]And Plummer should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

It was certainly a worthy performance (and the highlight of the film for me). But I'd have a hard time arguing that Michael Caine didn't deserve his Oscar that year.

Rusty would star in a 50 Load Weekend movie if it allowed him to be fat in the role.

I'd rather see him in "50 Loaf Weekend"!!

Doesn't big tobacco still make billions all over the world? That payout didn't change as much as I thought

For some obscure reason I remember the scene where Crowe was washing his hands in the kitchen sink and his wife bitched about it. He couldn't understand why and she said it's because it's for food. She was nuts.

I was 14 when this came out and thought it was so glamorous when Al Pacino went into the ocean up to his waist and screamed at Russell Crowe through his gigantic cellular phone.

R40 Please,

Cellular telephone

OP, R7, and R16

Diane's surname is V-E-N-O-R-A.

[quote]Plummer should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

Agreed, but that was a stacked year in that category. Any of the nominees would have been worthy winners.

(Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules; Tom Cruise in Magnolia; Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile; Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley; Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense)

Was Cruise in Magnolia good?

He was great, and his character rather eerily predicted the recent onslaught of sleazy "men's rights" carnival barkers. (Andrew Tate being one unfortunate exemplar.)

Is Tom Cruise gay?

R44, Yes; as R45 said, Magnolia is Tom Cruise’s best performance (and overall film) ever. Same for Philip Baker Hall, R16. They’ve both been great elsewhere, which shows the breadth of their talent.

I rewatched The Insider this summer for the second time. I thought it was very low stakes. I wanted to rewatch it after finally appreciating how amazing the film Heat is (also by Michael Mann). The Insider is well-executed—including casting (is there a DL Diane Venora thread?)—but “smoking is bad and the corps know and are hiding it for profit” is just limp & “duh” as a plot. Does not resonate.

The Insider could have been made any whichever year. American Beauty was a great synthesis of the Y2K zeitgeist; I am glad it swept the awards that season, and I stand by it 25 years later. I think awards reward things “of the moment.” It launched Alan Ball, and we got Six Feet Under, which is tremendous!

It was definitely a thriller. And a good one.