The Limey
Produced by Artisan Entertainment
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay by Lem Dobbs Released by Artisan Entertainment

The Insider
Produced by Touchstone Pictures
Directed by Michael Mann
Screenplay by Eric Roth from a Vanity Fair article
by Marie Brenner
Released by Buena Vista Pictures

Pokemon: The First Movie
Produced by 4 Kids Entertainment and Shogakukan
Directed by Michael Haigney and Kunohiko Yuyama
Screenplay by Norman J. Grossfeld and Takeshi Shud (English version)
Released by Warner Bros.

If it is to succeed, a narrative film, whether fact or fiction, must persuade us to believe in its events as they unreel before our eyes. Of the three movies being reviewed this month, Pokemon comes closest to achieving this holy grail of storytelling. The other two, The Limey and The Insider, mock our will to believe at every turn.

The Limey is misconceived from frame one. Let’s begin with director Steven Soderbergh’s choice of 60-year-old Terence Stamp to play the title character. Stamp is David Wilson, a British career criminal come to Los Angeles to revenge his daughter’s murder. He’s supposed to be a tough, relentless Cockney with street-trained reflexes, a man who inspires fear in all he meets. There’s just one small problem. Although athletic in his youth, Stamp has never looked especially menacing. Today, he seems weathered, even frail. Worse, he walks with a sidling gait left over from his transsexual role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. So when the script calls for him to recover instantly from a beating at the hands of five beefy drug dealers, hunt them down, and permanently dispatch them, the viewer’s credulity is strained. It snaps altogether when he tangles with a former footballer turned security guard and throws the bruiser over a four-foot railing to his death. Even if you wanted to continue suspending your disbelief, its virtually impossible when someone remarks that the thug weighed 400 pounds. (Surely this is Hollywood exaggeration. The man doesn’t look an ounce over 300.)

Even Stamp’s Cockney lingo is unconvincing. He’s given East End argot by the yard, but he speaks it with a halting, over-pronounced manner as though he has just finished a Berlitz course in underclass dialect and feels compelled to explain its odd locutions as he goes. “He’s me new China,” he says of an L.A. associate. Get it? China is plate and plate rhymes with mate, so it’s his way of calling the fellow his friend. Maybe subtitles would have done the trick.

Soderbergh tries to give the proceedings some desperately needed excitement by shuffling his montage back and forth in time. In a much discussed gimmick, he even includes footage from a 1967 film, Poor Cow, showing Stamp as a young man. Some critics have hailed this as innovative. I suppose it’s meant to invest Stamp’s character with additional poignancy by reminding us that the poor fellow is now well beyond middle age. Well, yes, if we don’t we check out early, we do get older. So what?

As Wilson’s sleazy prey, Peter Fonda fares better. He’s a corrupt rock-and-roll record producer (pardon the redundancy) who made heaps in the 60’s and now keeps adolescent nymphets on his arm to remind him of the old days. His current cutie, Stacy (Nicky Katt), looks barely out of grade school. She plays nearly all her scenes laving herself luxuriously in either her sugar daddy’s swimming pool or his bathtub. Alert the symbol police! More wanton rebirth iconography.

In perhaps the film’s best moment, Stacy deflates Fonda by talking about him as though he were an artifact of history. When he complains he’s not a thing, she coolly defends herself “Well, you’re certainly not a person. You’re not specific enough.” Ouch! Remarks like this understandably send Fonda fleeing to the nearest mirror to primp his hair, clothes, and teeth. O youth and beauty!

Soderbergh has tried to create a sweet-and-sour elegy to the 60’s presided over by two of the period’s faded icons. Too bad he didn’t get a script worthy of even this threadbare intention.

The script for Michael Mann’s The Insider has indisputably good intentions, and that’s its major problem.

Nearly two hours into this 15 5-minute melodrama, we hit pay dirt only to discover it’s fool’s gold. After much handwringing, whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) rats out his former employer. Brown and Williamson, in a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer). Playing Wigand as a man choking on his own barely suppressed rage, Crowe stumbles bullishly to the point. While at Brown and Williamson, he had argued against “impact boosting,” a practice that increases a cigarette’s nicotine payload by adding ammonia to its tobacco. (For pure poetry, nothing beats corporate speak.) In other words, he continues, tobacco companies are in the “nicotine delivery business.” Hearing this, Wallace leans in for the kill. Translating Wigand’s words into sound-bite eloquence, he asks him a lawyerly leading question in the form of a statement. “Put it in your mouth,” he intones, “light it up; you’re going to get your fix?” Wigand takes the bait and repeats Wallace’s words: “You’re going to get your fix.”

In a film that trumpets journalistic virtue at every turn, Plummer’s uncannily accurate portrayal of Wallace slyly gives the game away. His pouched eves narrow to gleaming slits, his mouth purses in a dry smile. He looks for all the world like an iguana who has just eaten a particularly succulent cockroach. You half expect to sec a forked tongue slither from between his wrinkled lips. He’s got what he wants. Ifs the fix his audience craves, the ail-American stimulant: moral outrage. There’s nothing like it for impact-boosting your ratings!

That is what’s wrong with The Insider. Rather than deliver a reasoned exposition of the tobacco issue, Mann has chosen to give his audience a fix that will make them feel morally superior for a few hours but change nothing when the narcotic wears off. He does this by featuring the more cinematically sensational aspects of Wigand’s case without really digging into it. In the process, he virtually ignores the real story which, as with so much else in America’s public life, lies with the legal community and their wondrous ability to cloud issues behind nearly impenetrable smokescreens.

Wigand is portrayed as a troubled, irascible man who, despite his $300,000-plus salary, felt undervalued as Brown and Williamson’s director of research. He had previously worked for Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson and had always thought of himself as “a man of science” before being lured away by Big Tobacco’s money. He had rationalized his move by telling himself he might do some good in his new position, perhaps devising a safer cigarette. But once at B&W, he soon discovered that science took a backseat to profits. Eventually falling out with the company’s leaders, he received a handsome settlement in severance pay and benefits on the condition that he strictly observe the confidentiality agreement he was pressured to sign.

A question arises: Given that, since at least the 1950’s, every sentient American has known that cigarettes are addictive and harmful, why would Wigand feel compelled to divulge this on broadcast television at such financial risk to himself and his family? True, he was the first to reveal conclusively that tobacco companies knowingly manipulate their product’s nicotine content, but was this really a surprise? Isn’t this giving the customers what they want? Besides, does this knowledge add anything substantive to the public’s understanding of the danger cigarettes pose? The film suggests Wigand was driven over the edge by B&W’s hamhanded policy of enforcing his silence with intimidation. We are treated to scenes of stalkings, death threats, even a bullet left in his mailbox, each given the full Hollywood treatment—ominous music, claustrophobic close-ups, off-balance handheld camera shots, and quickened montage. But the closing credits admit that none of these alleged abuses was ever substantiated. So did Wigand deliver his message merely out of spite? Or was there another motive?

We know that one special-interest group has found Wigand’s declaration immensely helpful: the personal-injury lawyers who had been longing to sue Big Tobacco on behalf of diseased smokers and state health-care programs. Wigand gave them the bullet they needed to bring down this cash cow that had eluded them for decades. This is the real story, but Mann gets it seriously wrong. In the film, all the anti-tobacco lawyers with whom Wigand cooperates come off as selfless public servants. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a good treatment of the legal operatives behind the scenes in the tobacco wars, see Peter Pringle’s book, Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice. Pringle reveals how the industry’s lawyers and their anti-tobacco adversaries cut a sweetheart deal that promises to enrich all concerned participants—except the small tobacco farmer. How much good it will do the general public, especially the poor bastards who are foolish enough to continue smoking, remains to be seen. The settlement ($368.5 billion, to be paid out to the states participating in the suit over 25 years) is enormous, but will these funds actually be used to defray our taxes and medical costs? Or, like state lotto proceeds officially earmarked for education, will they mysteriously disappear into other programs, ones a little closer to our representatives’ tender hearts? New York City and Nassau County on Long Island are already planning to balance their wantonly mismanaged budgets by issuing bonds backed by the tobacco pay day. Where there’s smoke . . .

The judgment against the industry sounds staggering. But the big tobacco companies have it all figured out. First, they’re lowering their costs by importing more and more tobacco from overseas while cutting the small American tobacco grower out of the market. Second, they’re paying for the settlement by colluding in “legal” price fixing, raising cigarette prices to cover their debt. Third, whatever part of the settlement is not covered by this surcharge. they’ll take as a tax deduction. All in all, not a bad arrangement when you consider that the terms of the agreement also insulate them from any further lawsuits on behalf of their croaking customers. And our heroes, the anti-tobacco lawyers? Well, by golly, they’ve hit the tobacco jackpot. They’re in line for fees of 15 to 25 percent of this settlement, making some of them multi-millionaires, if not billionaires.

Both sides have conveniently ignored the question of individual responsibility. Couldn’t Americans be considered capable of deciding on their own whether or not to risk smoking? No. It wouldn’t do for the counselors to bring this up because it would put their exorbitant fees at risk. On the other hand, those defending the industry could never admit that smoking was ever anything but a simple pleasure to be indulged as customers freely chose. If they admitted for a moment that tobacco has drug properties, the FDA would claim the right to regulate it as it does other pharmacological substances. Simple honesty is the first victim in our litigious society.

And so we’ve had to endure the pathetic comedy of the cigarette wars for more than three decades, culminating in a sadly hilarious spectacle in 1994 when the heads of the major cigarette companies were brought before Henry Waxman’s Health and Environment House Subcommittee. Swathed in their $3,500 suits and coifed to a fare-thee-well, the Seven Dwarves, as they’re affectionately known in the industry, stood up to the representatives with joint resolve. Adhering to their legally scripted position, each swore in turn that it had never once occurred to him to “believe” cigarettes were addictive. If you’ve ever wondered why CEOs are paid their obscenely inflated salaries, here’s the answer. The cool effrontery of these men was truly priceless.

Rather than trouble us with all this, Mann chose to focus primarily on the journalists involved, principally Lowell Bergman, the CBS producer who lured and shepherded Wigand into his moment of media fame on 60 Minutes. Played by Al Pacino, Bergman is supposed to be a latter-day John the Baptist risking his journalistic head to herald the truth. However, Pacino didn’t convince me that Bergman was anything more than a hotshot reporter who saw, in the short-fused Wigand, his chance for a sensational score. There’s nothing wrong in this. Journalists are supposed to go for scoops, even those that are more apparent than real. And Bergman is to be commended for fighting against those at CBS who wanted to spike the interview lest it invite a lawsuit from Brown and Williamson and sour the network’s pending sale to Westinghouse. The film’s moral posturing over Bergman’s battle, however, is at best a sidebar pretending to be the central issue.

Until we kick the habit of moral outrage, we’ll never be able to think clearly enough about tobacco to address its dangers effectively. We’ll just throw more money at it, hoping it will go away. Has our dreadful experience in trying to regulate and ban other drugs not taught us anything? To introduce the law and its main-chance minions into these matters is to invite waste, crime, corruption, and untold misery, not to mention the insufferable moralizing of media celebrities and Hollywood filmmakers.

And now a closing word about a film that exerts no serious strain on our will to believe: Pokemon: The First Movie. (The subtitle is a voluntary warning label.) The production is a colorful, stylized Japanese cartoon of ineffable cross-cultural dynamics—which is to say I have no idea what it’s about. Can anyone tell me why all the human characters look Western? Is there an Asian version of these cartoons? Well, I won’t press these questions. Liam, mv ten-year-old son, was completely charmed by these pocket monsters, which is, I learned, what “Pokemon” means. That was good enough for me, especially at matinee prices.