The only person we see smoking in The Insider is one of the Palestinian guards in the first scene of the film. After that, no one lights up. According to Entertainment Weekly, part of the reason for the smoke-free mis-en-scene is that Jeffrey Wigand, the title character and the real-life man around whom the film's story centers, demanded a ban on smoking as one of his conditions for participating in the making of the new Michael Mann film. His input must have been worth it, because The Insider is an interesting blend of truth, fiction, and intensity that surprises in its ability to tell what could have been an incredibly mundane story.
After seeing the film, sitting in the theater, eager to find out what was going to happen and who was going to do what, I realized just how strong a director must be to take a story that has no violence, no sex, and very little action and create a tense movie that pushes the boundaries of three hours without leaving its viewers in a Meet Joe Black sense of numb-butt zombiehood. Yet Mann keeps us interested with relatively little difficulty. He uses a plethora of hand-held shots, giving us the tense, rattled feeling that the real Wigand might have felt brushing past the hoards of reporters or rushing into his house to see if his family is all right. We're constantly bombarded with dialogue and plot; Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino's 60 Minutes producer character, the main character if not the center of the narrative) is always one step ahead of us, and since we are constantly trying to catch up, we don't get bored.
Of course, the truth/fiction line is carefully danced in the film. The real Lowell Bergman's life must be pretty exciting if he actually yells, intuits, discusses, and sleuths around as much as he does in the film. The cloak-and-dagger meetings of reporters and investigators seem a little contrived, as does the omniscient tobacco company's spying and influence. In other words, this film does well to foster the conspiracy nut in all of us. At the same time, these events did really happen; the conversations did take place and the arguments did rage. Perhaps the bad guys were not exactly the same - Entertainment Weekly says that Mike Wallace was rather unhappy with the implication in the film that he caved at one point - but the story is still told in a powerful manner that gives the audience heroes and villains, and that's what makes a good movie.
Perhaps the most important part of Mann's effort was that the values used as character cores for Wigand and Bergman were honorable and decent. The film's characters are eminently likable, men who have strong morals and are willing to stand up for what they believe in despite the consequences. As with any film in the nineties, each has his flaws as well, but their flaws are almost inconsequential to the audience, who sees Wigand's effort to 'stand up' for the people as eminently noble. Of course, the villains, too, are mostly faceless corporations: the tobacco lobby, CBS corporate. The characters we're given as representatives of those corporations are similarly faceless, shallow representatives of the greedy companies they work for. The film's technique works well: get the audience to love the heroes and hate the villains and they will go home happy.
Thus, we arrive back at the smoking man in Palestine. He is not, by any means, the center of the film. His cigarette is not, either. Yet despite the film's actual story about corporate greed, a 'whistleblower,' and the newsman who wanted to tell the world, the film does deliver its message about smoking. We hear the words that Jeffrey Wigand ruined his life to say and I, for one, am glad he said them. The Insider, like the cigarette the guard smokes, delivers more than it seems to. The cigarette secretly gives the smoker his nicotine; likewise, The Insider secretly gives us a message about smoking, hidden in a well-told story.