"The Insider" (1999)

[agate]

Some years back I read an eye-opening book that made it clear how this country was built up on tobacco. To this day it is still an enormously profitable business.

At the time when big tobacco was being accused and found guilty of knowing all along about the harmful effects of smoking, it was big news. It's easy to forget about sensational news stories as time passes even though the issues they raised are still with us, and so maybe it's not so bad to be posting about a movie that was made eleven years ago.

I don't usually like fictionalized dramatizations of facts but I made an exception here because I wanted at least a vague general idea of how the controversy was presented..

Seven CEOs of the major US tobacco companies lining up before Congress and swearing that they didn't regard tobacco as addictive--this scene is shown repeatedly in this hard-hitting movie. And on the other side we have Jeffrey Wigand, a former corporate officer at Brown and Williamson, who knows what big tobacco knew: that tobacco was indeed addictive, and in fact that the tobacco companies had all along been delivering a nicotine fix to its customers.

And that wasn't the worst of it. They had also been enhancing the nicotine fix with additives to give people a faster, surer high from the product.

The movie is the story of how the CBS news program "60 Minutes" dealt with the story of Wigand's revelations--and especially of what happened to Wigand, whose life was very nearly destroyed as he was caught up in a legal battle concerning his deposition.

I live in federally funded housing and am aware that it has been engaged in a powerful push to make its residential buildings smoke-free. In my lifetime the world has changed from being a place where you were often in a small minority if you didn't smoke to being a place where smoking is very actively discouraged and even forbidden.

It is hard to believe that so dramatic a change could be happening but it is.

One reason for this change probably involves this case: one person, Jeffrey Wigand, with some specialized confidential knowledge, fired by a company which nonetheless held him to a confidentiality agreement whereby he was not to divulge what he knew about the inner workings of Brown and Williamson.

If the man has a motivation for opposing Brown and Williamson, it is his concern for the health and welfare of his family--as well as his sense that what was being concealed here was lethally affecting millions of people.

The movie is confusing in spots but the main points come through loud and clear. Mike Wallace and the other "60 Minutes" people are portrayed as probably more admirable than they really are, and the movie sometimes seems to be trying to imitate "All the President's Men." It isn't as slick a movie as the story about Woodward and Bernstein but the subject matter is far more important.