The Insider

A biochemist and a journalist navigate the hazards of corporate life. The material is in fact pretty thin, so the filmmaker works hard to generate tension through a mechanism that simultaneously overplays and downplays the drama, constantly oscillating between heating things up and cooling them down. Extensive use is made of shaky camerawork, and it is one of the earliest examples of the fetish for orange and teal. The final hour, framed more as a contest between lawyering and journalisming, is a bit more interesting.

It’s good that the ending focuses not on heroic victory but rather on the limits of commercial television as a news medium. Nevertheless, the audience is also supposed to be impressed by the fact that the tobacco company eventually agreed to pay two or three hundred billion dollars, and, watching this a quarter of a century later (writing in 2025), one cannot help but also be aware that “nicotine delivery systems” are still as available as ever, and that Brown & Williamson carried on, becoming part of a merger in 2004 that created Reynolds American, before the latter was purchased by British American Tobacco in 2017 for $49.4 billion. Lowell Bergman studied philosophy under Herbert Marcuse (as the film mentions), and Jeffrey Wigand later married a philosopher who wrote a book on Socrates and another on Aristotle.