The Informant!
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale
Rated: R for language.
“The Informant!” is an odd mashup of a movie. It’s about a corporate whistleblower and the FBI operation his tattling provokes, but it’s not a clockwork thriller. Its hero seems like a nice guy, but is actually kind of an idiot — and it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s dumber, him for the various boneheaded things he does or the FBI for hanging their entire investigation on him. Director Steven Soderbergh has made a career out of thematically varied films, and it almost feels like with “The Informant!” he’s doing everything at once. Oddly, it works.
The film is based on a true story: Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) was a vice president at Archer Daniels Midland and (under pressure from his wife) he went to the FBI with information on price-fixing, becoming the highest-level executive whistle-blower in US history. The FBI persuaded him to go undercover and wear a wire, which he did, for three years. As time went on, though, it became clear that he wasn’t the most reliable source of information and was absolutely not cut out to be an undercover agent. He was telling the truth about the price-fixing, but not about plenty of other things.
Naive, enthusiastic, and alternately too clever for his own good and utterly boneheaded, Whitacre seems like an odd role for Damon, who’s more often seen in serious, dramatic parts or sharp, quick-thinking ones. But Damon is perfect here, bringing all of Whitacre’s contradictions together into one slightly-pudgy, deceptively average package. Whitacre is a basically good guy, but that leads him to do truly stupid things, like tell a nice coworker about an impending FBI raid so she won’t be scared when it goes down.
The FBI agents working with Whitacre have the patience of saints. Agent Shephard (Scott Bakula) is an old-fashioned lawman, and seems unsure how to handle Whitacre. He certainly doesn’t know how to tell him that the chances of him rising to be the head of ADM once all the price-fixing execs are in jail are practically nil. So he murmurs generalities about how hard it is to predict the way things will go once the case goes public and plows ahead with his investigation. It turns out he’s right, but not in the way he thought.
This isn’t a movie like Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11” franchise, full of sharp dialog and brilliant characters. This is a movie full of average folks. Whitacre, who has big dreams and who winds up in the center of an enormous scandal, is underneath it all, just another guy. The major players in the price-fixing scandal are just businessmen doing business — they’re not even smart enough to notice Whitacre’s obviously weird behavior.
“The Informant!” is a sharp, funny film that assumes you’re paying close attention. It’s not another “Ocean’s” film, so if you’re looking for whip-smart dialog and genius plans, go elsewhere. But if you’re curious about this strange, mostly-true story and have a fondness for the absurd, don’t miss it.