Liberties have been taken with the truth, announces an opening legend as The Informant! begins. Then:
“So there.”
And “So there” pretty much describes the playful, jaunty tone of The Informant!
My usual advice is to distrust any movie with an exclamation point in the title, as if it’s trying to manufacture energy that ought to be coming from the movie itself.
But this time you can skip that advice.
The Informant! doesn’t need help from punctuation. Although Matt Damon’s title character does kind of live his life as if accompanied by an exclamation point in this likable oddball comedy about a bizarre “hero.”
Accomplished director Steven Soderbergh works from screenwriter Scott Z. Burns’ adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 book, The Informant, a nonfiction chronicle about the highest ranking executive ever to blow the whistle on his employer.
But Soderbergh (Traffic, Che, Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen), serving as his own cinematographer under another name and with George Clooney on board as an executive producer, doesn’t take the obvious approach to the material. Instead, he turns what seems on the surface a corporate thriller into an offbeat comedy that recalls but doesn’t mimic The Insider, as well as his own Eric Brockovich, keeping the pace brisk and playing it for laughs. In tone, however, the movie this one recalls, with its throwback score by Marvin Hamlisch, is Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. When it isn’t suggesting itself as Ocean’s 14, that is.
Our unreliable narrator, tour guide, and master of the non sequitor, the literally unbelievable Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon, is a paunchy and bespectacled Ivy League Ph.D. (in nutritional biochemistry) and an executive with the Fortune 500 agri-business corporation, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), its corporate headquarters in rural Illinois. The ever-eager and usually upbeat Whitacre cooperates with the FBI from 1991 to 1995 and becomes the government’s star witness to help them expose his company’s illegal price-fixing practices as they collude with their competitors and parlay their crucial food additive into a bonanza.
But compulsive conversationalist and feverish fabricator Whitacre not only deludes himself into thinking he is some kind of slick superspy, managing to steal millions from ADM, but also somehow convinces himself that he will be rewarded for bringing the company down by being promoted within that same company.
Hello-o-o-o.
The FBI agents who recruit and train him — played by Scott Bacula and TV’s Joel McHale — are constantly amazed at Whitacre’s level of naivete as they talk him into wearing a wire and getting them proof of the malfeasance.
Damon, dominating the movie from first scene to last, is terrific as the wacky whistle-blower, stooping to the occasion by exhibiting a level of ineptness that rivals that of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau, in what is a radical departure from Damon’s fine work in the Bourne trilogy. Thirty pounds heavier and wearing a mustache, his inner life gradually and surprisingly revealed to us, his mind forever wandering even as he tells us his story and holds our undivided attention, he gives an absurdist comic performance that stands with his very best work. His line readings, body language, and facial reactions are all on the money.
Soderbergh, serving up the warped ironies like floats in a parade, allows the entertaining narration to take the edge off the plot’s convolutedness, and tells us more about Damon’s Whitacre than we realize we’re hearing. Until the Monday-morning-quarterback psychology dawns, later.
No, this cockeyed comedy isn’t laugh-out-loud funny and doesn’t really try to be. But it’s consistently and fascinatingly amusing.
The Informant! is a loopy lark about a snoopy snitch starring a welcome Matt.
By: Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic – Via: AHN – 108 minutes – In theaters September 18, 2009 – Rating: R, Comedy
