Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/4/09
Steven
Soderbergh can be an astonishingly gifted director of plain old stuff (Erin
Brockovich or Out of Sight, for instance). But he really
doesn't want to be. From the moment he followed up his breakthrough
on Sex, Lies and Videotape with the fascinatingly icy/brainy metaphysical
Eurothriller Kafka, it's been clear that to Soderbergh it's the
experimentation, the chance to do what not only he, but no one, has done
before that holds his interest. The whole joke of the Ocean's...
franchise
that's given him the freedom to pursue his interests these last few years
is how often they're not showing you what you paid to see. His latest
outing, The Informant!, is no exception to his career full of them.
It tells the story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-ranking corporate
official ever to turn whistleblower, as an absurdist comedy rather than
the Insider-style paranoid drama we'd expect. The result is
light on its' feet and funny, though it's also fairly forgettable.
Depending upon your feelings about its' real-life subject, it's also either
a stinging indictment of modern corporate greed or an insensitive burlesque
of mental illness.
In
the early 90's, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is making billions on corn-related
products and is about to add another blockbuster product to their stable
if a project overseen by Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) can just get the bugs
out of a new process. But he comes to his bosses one morning claiming
to have received a call from a competitor offering the name of a mole within
ADM who's been sabotaging the project. They call the FBI, and Special
Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) arrives to put a bug on Whitacre's phone.
His wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) insists that Mark tell the Fed about
a secret he'd been keeping from him: the FBI was permitted to tap
only his business line and not his personal one because he takes calls
on the personal line about a massive International price-fixing scheme
in which ADM is a participant. Joined by Agent Bob Herndon (Joel
McHale), Shepard does the only thing he can with this information, opening
an investigation in which Whitaker has no choice but to assist as an informant
or be charged. So, why did he confess to the price-fixing?
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he made up the call about
the mole. And as he gets deeper into his new role as double-agent,
Mark's problems with the truth are only just beginning.
The
Informant! exists primarily as a showcase for Damon, who gives his
all to one very odd character. As interpreted by the film (through
the prism of Kurt Eichenwald's book of the same title, albeit without the
exclamation point), Whitacre was a delusional buffoon who did or said whatever
it took to get ahead, even after his sense of cause-and-effect totally
jumped the tracks. This is a funny schtick, and Damon plays it very
well. Having put on about 30 pounds and sporting an unflattering
hairstyle and goofy mustache, he starts out in a haze of idiotic doogoodery
and passes a point where he's in a haze of idiotic desperation that's pretty
much indistinguishable from its' predecessor, perhaps because he only ever
“wanted” to do the right thing to advance his own ambitions. Whitacre
narrates in a perpetual present tense in which his character is as likely
to be mulling fashion or trivia as the pressing matters of the moment.
The effect is to make him one of the least relatable protagonists I can
recall. He's funny, and his story is funny, but there's never any
doubt that he deserves whatever he gets because he's totally, utterly one
of “them”.
Whitacre
will, of course, end up serving far more prison time than anyone at ADM,
and while that fact spurs outrage from pretty much everyone involved with
the real-life case, the movie takes so little notice of it that it could
very well be taken as another of the informant's exaggerations. Soderbergh's
arch tone is at least as outraged that the government's star witness keeps
screwing up the case with his own behavior as at the billions of dollars
stolen from consumers by the company's graft and corruption. The
Informant!'s sense of bemusement is seriously retro (both Smothers
brothers turn up in cameos, and Marvin Hamlish contributes an entertainingly
wacky score he might well have composed in 1971): while it's set
in the 90's, the absence of go-go dancers with the words “price fixing”
painted on them seems a bit glaring. That's why the movie works as
a comedy, but on no other level. A case that says a ton about the
way major corporations manipulate the system even once they've been caught
and the ever-greater plight of the whistleblower gets little real consideration.
Researching
the real-life tale as I always do after seeing a fact-based movie, I was
a bit surprised to learn that Whitacre's claims of a bipolar disorder are
accepted as fact: the movie tends to treat it as yet another desperate
excuse. In retrospect, that makes a bit of the wackiness of Crazy
Old Liar Mark Whitacre a bit queasy, since his manic narration in particular
seems to be making fun of mental illness. But I can't say I didn't
laugh, it's just odd to see a movie this laid-back also be this politically
incorrect.
Pretty
much everybody else in the movie is Damon's straight man, and it's Bakula
who really shines in that regard. The same corn-fed decency that
has served him so well as a TV star over the years is a perfect counter-balance
to Whitacre's ethically challenged goofiness. He never seems to run
out of a deeper furrow in which to set his brows, and the pregnant pauses
after each unbelievable revelation just get longer and longer. It's
a fun performance, and they make a solid comic team that carries the movie
through its' generally unengaging tone.
I had
a good time at The Informant!, but it's hard to remember the last
movie I enjoyed that I connected with less. Not much food for thought
here, or characters who're more than the sum of what you see onscreen.
I went, I laughed, I wrote this review. In a year or so, I'll probably
be reading it to be reminded that I ever saw this movie in the first place.
But it's a cute diversion, Damon's fans will enjoy watching him stretch,
and Hamlish's base can enjoy his first big-screen score in 13 years.
It's certainly unique, and that, above all else, is what the Steven Soderbergh
brand name stands for. |
