A textbook case of a worthy cause mistaken as screen-worthy. The cause is anti-smoking, the urgency of which is somewhat undermined by the curious fact that no one on screen is guilty of smoking, even in the high-stress environment of the CBS News Department, even in the unwinding environment of a Manhattan bar, even for purposes of mild irony. An instance, this, of principle carried too far. The story is the more or less factual one of tobacco-industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, and of the efforts of the 60 Minutes news team to get around his signed confidentiality agreement with the tobacco company, get around the roadblocks put up by the network's legal advisors, and get his testimony on the air. Overdirected by Michael Mann (lots of rack focus and agitated camerawork) to compensate for the excess of talk and the absence of physical action, the movie seems, a great deal of the time, to be goosing the reality of the situation. Interest picks up considerably in the last hour or so (of a two-and-a-half-hour movie), with the fly-on-the-wall eavesdropping on the intramural tussle between CBS News and CBS Corporate. Christopher Plummer ("Don't worry. We call the shots around here") is a much more complicated and compromised Mike Wallace than the real one could possibly have been comfortable with: proof positive of the alleged vanity. Interest in the performances of Russell Crowe as the whistle-blower, meanwhile, and Al Pacino as Wallace's Left-leaning producer (Marcuse disciple, Ramparts alumnus), centers to a distracting degree on their respective heads of hair: the antiquing dye job on Crowe's, the rejuvenating basketry job on Pacino's. With Diane Venora, Lindsay Crouse. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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