Features > Movie Reviews > The Informant!…

(Among the good, I think you would have to list The Insider, Michael Clayton, and Steven Soderbergh?s Erin Brockovich).

Soderbergh?s latest almost goes to the opposite exteme. It’s insistent on its own absurdity.

It’s a risky strategy that may have cost the film the kind of respect it deserves in the US – and Matt Damon an Oscar nomination. Audiences like to know who they’re rooting for, but for the longest time, we’re never quite sure what makes Damon?s character, Mark Whitacre, tick, even though a stream of consciousness voice-over narration puts us inside his head for most of the film’s two hour running time. As a result, The Informant! is delightfully unpredictable or irritatingly unsatisfying, depending on how you look at it.

That also sets a problem for a reviewer, because it would be a pity to undermine the film’s surprises. Here’s what you can and should know: it is based on a true story. Whitacre was a bio-chemist at a powerful US agri-business, ADM, for a number of years, eventually working his way up to the top tiers of management.

In an unheard of eventuality, the high-flyer turns whistle-blower. At first he claims that a Japanese competitor is attempting blackmail. But when the FBI comes to investigate, he stuns the agent (Scott Bakula) by revealing his own firm is involved in an international price-fixing scam. The Feds require evidence, and soon Mark is assisting them, amassing hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings. In the process, he begins to think of himself as a James Bond – or Jason Bourne – super-spy. His ego, and his judgment, prove completely out of control.

In a typically bold move, Soderbergh opts to shoot this in the elegantly composed style of a 1970s conspiracy thriller – say, All the President?s Men. It doesn’t look or feel like the 1990s, the orangey glow of the lighting suggests a slightly faded old movie, but then again, ADM was based in Illinois, and middle America is not New York (in point of fact Soderbergh shot in the Whitacres’ actual mansion).

In a seemingly paradoxical stylistic choice, the director has veteran composer Marvin Hamlisch (The Sting; A Chorus Line) punctuate the action with a disarmingly jaunty, upbeat score – the kind of theme music Whitacre might have playing inside his own earnest but bewildering head.

Funny in a knowing, bitterly ironic fashion, The Informant! suggests the infinite corruption that we know is eating away at the heart of big business must also have wormed its way into the good old American hero.

Pudgy, with a ridiculously square moustache and hairpiece, a self-consciously stiff-backed walk, Damon is still something of a boy scout, and you have to respect Mark’s courage and peculiar integrity. Very peculiar, as it turns out – but that’s for you to see for yourself. This movie pays us the considerable compliment of leaving us to take our own moral bearing – something that Mark Whitacre, caught up in his own Hollywood fantasies, seems to have been completely incapable of.