MOVIE REVIEWS : Reporter Infiltrates Tabloid in ‘The Man Inside’

It took writer-director Bobby Roth 10 years to make “The Man Inside”--a fact-based melodrama about West German reporter Gunter Wallraff and his infiltration of a reactionary tabloid--and the effort shows.

There’s something worked-over, almost perfunctory about the film (AMC Century 14 and Beverly Center Cineplex). It’s sleek, it’s fast, but it has a hollow, exhausted feel. It’s less a film than a dream of a film, an obsession that eluded Roth, but which, with incredible stubbornness and will power, he kept seizing and renewing.

Set in 1975, it’s about the efforts of left-wing, “outlaw” investigative journalist Wallraff (the movie’s only non-fictitious name) to crack the shield of West Germany’s most influential tabloid, Der Bilt--here called “The Standard.”

Wallraff, played by Jurgen Prochnow of “Das Boot,” is a specialist in false papers and disguises. Here, he smuggles himself into the paper and becomes, with unusual rapidity, one of its ace reporters, the darling of its scowling, Sturm und Drang editor Schroeter (Dieter Laser), who helps school him in the art of slick, shoddy, callous reporting and flagrant propaganda.

The Standard has ties to West Germany’s security chief, and it’s hinted that a neo-fascist conspiracy fuels its editorial policy. Wallraff burrows into that conspiracy even as the Standard and the security apparatus are outside, unaware of his penetration, systematically trying to hunt him down.

The movie has the rhythm and shape of docudrama, but the look and sound of stripped-down kitsch. The Standard--supposedly West Germany’s most popular tabloid--has unusually Spartan quarters. Four star reporters, including Wallraff and fellow ace Henry Tobel (Peter Coyote), are grouped around a sort of mass conference desk, where they’re constantly subjected to the perfervid abuse and menacing affections of editor Schroeter, who dispenses his favors through story length (“20 lines” is a mild rebuke, “40 lines” a reward), orders his staff to attack the poor and different, hail the rich and link up every conceivable strain of dissent with the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Like Costa-Gavras--a heavy influence here--Roth likes to suggest homosexual motivations in his villains; both Schroeter and Tobel seem to fall in love with Wallraff on sight. Coyote seizes on this undercurrent. In a cast loaded with top international names, including Prochnow, Nathalie Baye, Monique van de Ven and Philip Anglim, his is the only performance with surprises. When Tobel seizes Wallraff’s hand after a chess game, there’s something startlingly raw in his face, grim and wolfish against the racy chrome of the film’s plot.

In “Heartbreakers,” also with Coyote--and an actor, Nick Mancuso, who somewhat resembles Prochnow--Roth zeroes in on similar, if subconscious, male bonding in the Los Angeles art world. “Heartbreakers” was serious and offbeat, but it had a major flaw, repeated here: incredibly sparse dialogue--so spare it becomes almost purely functional.

In “The Man Inside,” where the characters are supposed to be journalists and writers, this terseness seems even more willed and anachronistic. People don’t talk this way--in laconic four- or five-word sentences and bursts of exclamatory exposition--unless they’re in “Dragnet,” a post-1980 movie script or they’ve just come from the dentist.

The movie, shorn of its topicality, probably had to revive itself by emphasizing the psychological drive at its core: the mingled terror and fascination of a man embraced by people he’s convinced are his enemies, the dilemma of a rogue of integrity loose in the belly of the beast. But “The Man Inside” (rated PG, despite adult themes) doesn’t get far enough inside itself. Initially idealistic and gutsy, it’s become a metallic husk: the movie outside.

‘THE MAN INSIDE’

A New Line Cinema presentation of a Philippe Diaz production. Producer Philippe Diaz. Director-script-executive producer Bobby Roth. Camera Ricardo Aronovitch. Art director Didier Naert. Editor Lucie Grunewaldt. Music Tangerine Dream. With Jurgen Prochnow. Peter Coyote, Nathalie Baye, Dieter Laser, Monique Van de Ven, Philip Anglim, Henry G. Sanders. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (adult themes).