Mike Wallace is Here
How would Mike Wallace operate as a journalist under the presidency of Donald Trump? We see brief moments of him talking with Trump in old interview, as well as him with Vladimir Putin, but would he be able to dig into the hard truths Trump’s presidency has brought out in the country? Would he be able to get an honest answer out of him? I think Wallace would have tried his damnedest to do so; that much is abundantly clear from Avi Belkin’s fantastic documentary.
Wallace has been gone since 2012, and I’m curious how many people really remember him as a journalist. We surely remember “60 Minutes” (which is still going, but long ago lost its impact as must-see news reporting), and film fans remember Christopher Plummer’s performance as Wallace in Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” but “Mike Wallace is Here” is a refreshing reminder of how potent an interviewer he was, and why his was a voice that mattered in American journalism. Belkin starts off with a moment, though, in Wallace’s 2007 interview with Bill O’Reilly where O’Reilly lays down some hard truths to Wallace, that O’Reilly’s brash nature wouldn’t exist without Wallace’s bracing, and almost revolutionary, interview style. You either die a hero, or you see yourself live long enough to become the villain. I don’t know that Wallace was ever a villain, but his tactics became the tools of lesser journalists to bring toxicity to the profession, and open a Pandora’s Box of how the news world, and the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press, could be weaponized against the truth. Wallace understood where news journalism was headed, but I don’t know if he could have done anything to combat it in a meaningful way; he would have fought, though, and it feels like his son, Chris, has tried to do his part in doing so on Fox News. This is a weird time for the press in this country.
We do not get any narration in Belkin’s film, but it does follow a relatively linear path through Wallace’s career, from his start on radio to his first interview shows, “Night Beat” and “The Mike Wallace Interview,” where we see him bringing the same, abrasive interview style he would become famous for on “60 Minutes.” We see him interviewing Rod Serling, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and even the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and he is not afraid of challenging his subjects. We also see him on remotes, and it’s hard not to admire how he brought life to those reports. When “60 Minutes” starts, his profile rises to its greatest heights, and his craft of interviewing brings further challenges when it comes to Watergate, the Nixon presidency, the hostages in Iran, and looking at the Vietnam War, one particular interview which led to a libel suit against he and CBS that was later dropped. Near the end, we see his charting of the downfall of cigarettes, as well as clips from the interview with tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand that led to the events in “The Insider,” and it’s fallout. Through it all, we feel admiration for Wallace, and challenged by how he did his work, but also do not get much of his personal life. That does feel fitting, though; Mike Wallace wasn’t known for much of anything apart from his work, and his work says a tremendous amount about who he was, and how he lived. His life was one to be both admired and challenged by, as well.
