DVD: Divine Viewing Diversions
Whistleblowers have certainly been in the news and on our minds in recent years. That’s because anyone informing on someone engaged in an illicit activity – or so the definition goes – is already embedded in an inherently dramatic circumstance. So it’s no surprise that they turn up with a certain amount of regularity on the movie screen. Here, then, are 10 of the most entertaining whistleblower thrillers well worth catching up with or revisiting.
ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)
Marlon Brando starred in director Elia Kazan’s intense and indelible drama about dockworkers and harbor unions in New York City. He plays an ex-boxer, with Rod Steiger as his crooked-lawyer brother, Lee J. Cobb as his waterfront union boss, and Eva Marie Saint as the woman he loves. This gritty, violent portrait of mob informers was a commercial success as well as a critical smash, the winner of eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Brando), Best Supporting Actress (Saint), Best Director, Best Story and Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Art Direction. Brando “coulda been a contender,” as he states unforgettably in a scene set in the back seat of a taxicab, but the film was all that and more. Appropriately, this instant classic really packs a wallop.
SERPICO (R, 1973)
Al Pacino was the titular headliner in this Sidney Lumet-directed drama. It’s a biopic filmization of the Peter Maas book that offered the real-life account of the honest undercover New York City cop, Frank Serpico, a nonconformist played by Pacino. He’s a maverick who refused to look the other way and instead exposed the rampant department corruption that was in or near his face day after day. Needless to say, his David-vs.-Goliath stance isolated him from the rest of the force, which turned against him in ways large and small. The charismatic Pacino fit the role perfectly, and two Oscar nominations ensued: a Best Actor nod for Pacino and one for Best Adapted Screenplay, both helping to render this outing a definitive blow-the-lid-off thriller.
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (PG, 1976)
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed real-life Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who investigated the Watergate break-in that led to a monumental political scandal. Director Alan J. Pakula expertly juggled and mixed thriller elements, detective work and journalism themes in a gripping, understated, perfectly measured work that walked off with Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Robards as executive editor Ben Bradlee), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Sound. Here’s a movie so precise and authentic, it holds up in screening after screening, whether you know the outcome in advance or -- much less likely -- not.
THE CHINA SYNDROME (PG, 1979)
Jane Fonda as a television reporter, Jack Lemmon as a principled executive, and producer Michael Douglas as a camera operator co-starred in this suspenseful and disturbing 1979 cautionary drama about the attempted cover-up of a meltdown at a small California nuclear power plant. Grip-the-armrest tense, splendidly acted, and especially prophetic – the Three Mile Island accident would occur 12 days after its release – the politically relevant film about what “safe” means earned three Oscar nominations: Best Actor (Lemmon), Best Actress (Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay for a script that explores not only nuclear power and danger but the now-familiar limitations of television journalism as well.
SILKWOOD (R, 1983)
Mike Nichols directed the consummate actress Meryl Streep in this superb, riveting 1983 drama that dramatizes the goings-on in an Oklahoma nuclear-parts factory. The dependable Streep portrays real-life activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a 1974 automobile crash under suspicious circumstances as she attempted to report safety problems in the plant. The film earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Actress (Streep), Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Cher), Best Original Screenplay (Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen), and Best Editing. And despite the audience’s presumed familiarity with the actual outcome, a remarkably high level of suspense is sustained from first frame to last.
THE INSIDER (R, 1999)
Director Michael Mann’s riveting, fact-based story of a “60 Minutes” segment producer, played by Al Pacino, who gets a fired scientist, portrayed by Russell Crowe, to go on the record and spill the beans about the tobacco industry. Thus, what the heads of seven tobacco companies knew but did not reveal about the dangers of their products become obvious for a worldwide audience to see and hear. The potent drama was acknowledged with seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Crowe), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Sound. Absorbing, suspenseful and important, this is an unforgettable morality tale and a Movie That Matters, the makers of which are operating at the top of their respective games.
ERIN BROCKOVICH (R, 2000)
Julia Roberts won the Academy Award for Best Actress for this real-life whistleblower drama. The charismatic star plays the title character, a brassy, unemployed single mother of three who becomes a legal assistant and takes on the perpetrators of a major environmental crime to help to bring down a California power company – Pacific Gas & Electric -- that’s accused of polluting a city’s water supply. In addition to Roberts’s Oscar, the film also was nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Albert Finney as her boss), Best Director (Steven Soderbergh), and Best Screenplay. Broadly entertaining and smartly accusatory without being preachy, this is admirable, satisfying, large-scale moviemaking.
NORTH COUNTRY (R, 2005)
A mother of two, played by Best Actress-nominated Charlize Theron, leaves her abusive husband and gets a job in an iron mine in Minnesota in 1989. There are evidently various forms of sexual harassment being endured by the female employees, who fear that coming forward will cost them their much-needed jobs, or more. A strong ensemble that includes Best Supporting Actress nominee Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sissy Spacek, Sean Bean, Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Renner and Michelle Monaghan helps director Niki Caro to dramatize a landmark case. Theron is fine in the lead, and the level of tension keeps us absorbed early on and throughout. Given what has occurred off-screen with regard to sexual harassment in recent years, more than a few viewers will find this solid, pertinent drama well ahead of its time.
MICHAEL CLAYTON (R, 2007)
George Clooney stars as a “fixer” for a corporate law firm, a white-collar troubleshooter par excellence. When one of the firm’s lead attorneys, played by Tom Wilkinson, reveals incriminating evidence in a major class-action lawsuit, the title character goes to work. But this contretemps will test his clean-up-the-mess skills. Screenwriter Tony Gilroy, making his directorial debut, received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, while Tilda Swinton as the firm’s chief counsel won for Best Supporting Actress. Also among the dazzling film’s seven nominations were Best Picture, Best Actor (Clooney), Best Supporting Actor (Wilkinson), and Best Music. The narrative might be dense at times, but production values, beginning with the acting, are remarkably high.
THE INFORMANT! (R, 2009)
Matt Damon stars in this true but fictionalized comedy from director Steven Soderbergh, set in the early 1990s. He plays an executive on the rise at a biofuel corporation in the Midwest who Is pressured to become an informant for the FBI as it investigates the questionable price-fixing practices of greedy corporation employees. Surprises surface from several directions in an absurdist tale that gets increasingly bizarre and is too bananas to be anything but a real-life happening: Let’s just say that the film more than earns its titular exclamation point. Ultimately, Damon’s protagonist threatens to derail the very investigation that he helped launch. Damon is perfectly cast and the film remains funny even as it turns into an unpredictable caper thriller.
