Resolve:

The Insider and The Straight Story

viewed February 20, 2000 at the Balboa

For full information about The Insider, click here

For full information about The Straight Story, click here

For some time I've been contemplating a move to New York City.  The reason is primarily to be with my girlfriend, who would probably no longer be my girlfriend if I chose to stay 3000 miles from her for another year.  It hasn't been as easy a decision to make because, contrary to my dour behavior at home, I have strong feelings towards my family, with whom I now live, and have felt guilty at the thought of leaving them for what could be for good, moving away to such a distance.  This month has been pretty rough as I've tried to come to terms with my options before I drag any further into indecision.  Unsure of where or with whom I belonged, for a while I was getting agitated with my family during our weekend outings, and distant with my girlfriend during our regularly scheduled phone calls.  Finally I resorted to what all young men do for resolution: I escaped.

I escaped to the Richmond district on a rainy night, had a plate of spaghetti and some good garlic bread at a diner and watched two great movies at the Balboa Theater, sneaking into one for good measure.  However, they weren't just any two movies; they were The Insider and The Straight Story, two movies about difficult men making important decisions in their lives, decidedly more important than mine.  One puts his self and family at risk to blow the whistle on the unethical practices of the tobacco industry.  The other drives several weeks and several hundred miles on a lawnmower to visit his ailing brother.  Later I told my girlfriend about my experience, to which she replied, in effect, how can you write about movies at a time like this.  Which reinforced what those movies told me: man, you've got to go it alone.

The Insider is unmistakably a man's movie; it was directed by Michael Mann, who has sung his odes to machismo in Heat, The Last of the Mohicans and "Miami Vice".  Aside from being a smart, punishing but ultimately redeeming look at how the media industry's ethics waver under the banner of big business, it is mostly an exploration of what a man's gotta do when no one can be trusted to back him up, even when they try all they can to help.  Jeffrey Wigand (played ferociously by Russell Crowe) makes a stand against his former employer, Brown & Williamson, knowing there will be hell to pay.  He doesn't realize the half of it.  His wife, unable to withstand the pressure of anonymous threats and the paranoia of her own husband, leaves, taking the kids with her.  "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) does everything in his power to keep Jeffrey sane and open to testifying, but too many slip-ups happen, and in Jeffrey's eyes Lowell's trustworthiness is compromised.  If Jeffrey, left utterly stranded, is going to do anything, it won't be for the sake of anyone else.

We get to the point where Jeffrey is shacked up in a hotel room directly facing the legal offices of Brown & Williamson, the very team set up to bring him down.  He starts to hallucinate his kids running around in a garden, and he is at a distance, watching them, wanting to reach out.  This is the vision of a man about to snap.  Oh yes, that old feeling.

He actually has quite a few moments of solitary contemplation, and Mann always makes them known by using narrow lenses to isolate Jeffrey from his surroundings.  A moment when he is standing out on a lawn overlooking a gulf, pondering whether to testify in court, as droves of expectant reporters are held back by police, uses the long shot to beautiful effect.  It is Mann's celebration of man's ability to act decisively through solitude.

Is this decidedly masculine virtue perhaps overly romanticized by Mann?  Probably.  Jeffrey Wigand certainly wasn't a perfect person, prone to abrupt fits of anger and at times aloof to his family (the nature of his work for the cigarette company may have brought that on).  But this movie turns his faults into virtues, for in his times of self-inflicted crises does his manly resolve emerge.  Could he have been more communicative towards his wife during an extreme state of duress?  Probably.  Instead of exploring that path, Mann chooses to paint Jeffrey's wife as an insensitive woman quick to bail out when the boat of their marriage is rocking, adding more strife to Jeffrey's noble struggle to figure out on his own what to do.  Following Mann's logic, she did him a favor.

Fortunately for Alvin Straight, he has a sympathetic daughter who simply steps out of the way when he decides to ride his John Deere to another state.  At 73, he is a stubborn man, insistent to go out his own way, chain smoking cigars, and bumping along on two bad hips riding the interstate.  But it's all for a good cause: his own redemption.  

Ten years ago he had a terrible falling out with his brother.  The reasons he gives for the incident are Biblical: pride, envy, drunkenness. Now he's going to set things straight, not only by visiting him but by putting himself through the most grueling and improbable mode of transportation to get there.  Out in the elements, exposed to the scornful, incredulous looks of passers-by, he is humbled.   However, going at 4 miles an hour, he is offered a significantly different point of view of life's tempo than the truckers and commuters who blow dust at him from behind.  He gets to enjoy the starry nights, and wait through the rainy days, too wet to drive.  What matters is that this -- punishment and redemption -- is all being done on his terms.

I think the Europeans, when they awarded best foreign film of the year to this film (is there a David Lynch movie they don't like?), merely saw it as a quaint Fargo-esque view of the wise ways of common American folk, much preferable to the standard Hollywood fare that saturates international markets.  Who knows how much they regarded him as a hero brimming with wisdom and judicious resolve, and how much they saw a crazed curmudgeon too stubborn to just get on a bus.  By most accounts, the Alvin Straight we see touchingly played by Richard Farnsworth is a cuter, Disney-fied, version of somebody who was apparently a real asshole of an old man.  Lynch is also culpable in beautifying the story with his breathtaking shots of hills and wheatfields, and longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti offers a rich backwoods score.  That's nothing blameworthy -- it is a gorgeous film to look at, that happens to have an agenda, which is accomplished to the tee.  It's a character study that is easy on it's character just as it's easy on our eyes.  It wants to justify the old man's loony actions because it presumes that condemning would be too easy.  But in doing so, the film makes it seem that Straight took what was for him the easier way out.  To be riding across state in a bus with other people -- now that would have been suffering.

A man's got to be alone.  And thus instructed, I left my popcorn-littered classroom to return to my dilemma.  I wrote to my girlfriend about what I learned, eliciting the previously mentioned, exasperated response.  And so my solitude was reinforced, and then from that solitude came... resolve.  The following evening I sat with my mom and told her I planned to leave by the end of the year.  It was a hell of a lot easier than I expected, which made me wonder why I had built up all of this tension and made things seem so difficult in my brain the whole time.  I guess it's what a man's gotta do.

Here's what my brother has to say about The Insider's accuracy after meeting Jeffrey Wigand.

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