8 NOVEMBER, 1999: Perhaps the most overused word in critical hyperbole is ‘risky’, and I try to stay away from it. Frankly, calling a movie risky is just inviting trouble; how many good laughs do we get out of an incorrect prediction of a film’s reception? A couple of years ago ‘Entertainment Weekly’ called the ‘Star Wars’ reissues one of the year’s biggest risks; the trio dominated the box office for the entire spring. No critic should try to play soothsayer because there is simply no way to guess what will play and what will not, and what will sink and what will swim (I would have guessed, ‘risky’ or not, that ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Bringing Out the Dead’ would be two of the fall’s biggest hits, based on their leads alone. So what the fuck do I know?).

But I saw two films last weekend that are risky, for very different reasons, and I greatly enjoyed both of them, in equally different ways. ‘Being John Malkovich’ is honestly one of the strangest films to find its way onto American screens in quite some time; it dares to tell a completely unusual and unpredictable story, and it succeeds (mostly; more on that later). ‘The Insider’ is a long, thoughtful mediation on big business and media that most moviegoers will find ‘slow’ or ‘boring’, but I found to be thought-provoking and exhilarating in its own methodical way. What these films share is that most elusive of qualities: they’re both memorable, in ways that not enough films recently have been (I dare anyone to remind me of a memorable scene in ‘Double Jeopardy’).

‘Malkovich’ stars John Cusack (always inspired, always interesting) as an unemployed New York puppeteer who works as a filing clerk in a 7 ½ floor office building, where he finds a portal behind a filing cabinet that transports him into the brain of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes before dumping him alongside the New Jersey Turnpike. I enjoyed that sentence so much I’m tempted to type it again. It’s a deliciously oddball set-up for a film, but what makes ‘Malkovich’ work is that writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze don’t settle on this idea and ride it out; they continue to find interesting ways to raise the stakes and toy with the premise, many of them thanks to the deliciously peculiar women in Cusak’s life, played to perfection by Cameron Diaz and the wonderfully emasculating Catherine Keener.

The other reason that ‘Malkovich’ works is Malkovich himself, who appears in one of the great self-mocking performances in movie history. He toys with his weirdo image, his curious fame, and his own shortcomings, and does them all perfectly. And the scene where he tries the portal himself is, quite simply, one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

I’m sad to report that things start to come apart towards the end; the film is a good fifteen minutes too long, and it can’t seem to come to a conclusion that satisfying (at least in comparison to what it must conclude). However, the fact that it can’t quite finish what it starts should in no way negate the fact that it tried in the first place.

In many ways, no film could be more different from this one than Michael Mann’s ‘The Insider’, a hard-nosed fact-based look at the controversial relationship between ‘60 Minutes’ producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino, in terrific form) and tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe). Mann last directed Pacino in the brilliant ‘Heat’, one of the few great thinking-man’s action movies, and if this film lacks the intensity and thrills of that one (and the sheer joy of Pacino and DeNiro sharing a film), it confirms Mann as one of our smartest and most stylish storytellers.

Many have made the comparison to ‘All The President’s Men’, so I won’t (whoops, just did); this is a film about television and not printed news, so the focus is on the producer instead of the reporter, and the producer is Lowell Bergman, expert played by Pacino with just the right mix of quiet intensity and occasional fire and brimstone. A lot of people complain about Pacino’s recent performances, claiming he falls back too often on vocal theatrics and easy showmanship. But, like his underrated work in ‘Donnie Brasco’, this is a finely modulated performance that never reaches and never pushes.

Russell Crowe is all but unrecognizable under glasses, a gut, and a head of thinning white hair, and his work here is 180 degrees from ‘L.A. Confidential’ but nearly as good. The character is hard to get to—flawed but decent, difficult but dedicated, and seen mostly through Pacino’s eyes. Supporting performances are mostly sharp, especially from Christopher Plummer and the excellent Phillip Baker Hall, though Diane Venora is mostly uninteresting as Wigand’s wife.

Mann’s pacing is deliberate; he takes his time introducing us to the characters, and doesn’t rush Bergman’s delicate courting of Wigand’s story. But the movie really takes off when CBS execs force an editing of the story for various cloudy legal reasons, and Bergman becomes convinced that an upcoming corporate buyout gave the company cold feet. Pacino’s furious monologue in Baker Hall’s office is one for his time capsule, right up there with barnburners like the ‘Attica’ scene in ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and the ending of ‘Scent of a Woman’. Bergman’s undercover struggle to expose CBS’ cowardice and redeem himself to Wigand is the dramatic high point of the film; naturally, this is the point at which some news organizations have claimed the film veers most dramatically from fact. Who cares? Fact doesn’t always necessarily make good drama, and this sequence is as exhilarating as the best moments in ‘President’s Men’ (whoops, did it again).

Four years have passed between ‘Heat’ and ‘The Insider’, and in that time Mann has only grown more confident as a filmmaker. His sharp cutting, expert use of music, and skill with actors were intact in that film; in the interim, he has become brave enough to tackle quiet drama with the same intensity he brought to thoughtful action. The film’s slow box office is a disappointment but not a surprise—we do, after all, have a three-hour drama about ethics and morals and the like, and I’ll not use this opportunity to slam ‘Double Jeopardy’ or ‘The Best Man’ even one more time. Maybe this will be one of those movies that we’ll get another look at in a few years and realize that the expert director and fine cast, all working at the top of their form, were really on to something.