Soderbergh’s The Informant! a Duplicitous Treasure
For Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a rising star at agri-industry giant Archer Daniels Midland, lying isn’t so much an art form as it is a way of life. He’s so good at telling his bosses one thing, his wife (Melanie Lynskey) another, his friends something completely different and the FBI (Scott Bakula, Joel McHale) – for whom he is secretly undercover as a corporate whistle blower – another thing entirely he almost doesn’t even notice he’s doing it. Sure, the price fixing he’s uncovered is real but that doesn’t make what he’s saying any more believable, and unless he’s careful all these little ruses are going to grow so big they’re almost certain to come back and bite him in the butt.
Matt Damon and his corn in Warner Bros' The Informant!
Steven Soderbergh (CHE, Ocean’s Eleven), working from an ingenious script by writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) and based on journalist Kurt Eichenwald’s best-selling nonfiction book, attempts to balance laughs and social commentary with his latest effort The Informant!. By and large he succeeds fabulously, the film so uncomfortably hysterical its full impact upon me is almost impossible to describe.
What’s so odd about this is that as humorous as all this is, I cannot say that I ever actually laughed out loud at anytime during the film’s promotional screening. And yet I was extremely happy, my guts ripping to pieces as Whitacre kept slipping more and more down his slippery, almost suicidal, slope. This is the kind of movie where you know it is working based on how much it makes you squirm, the humor so distinctive and unnerving it is sometimes hard to know where the satire ends and the farcical truth begins.
Obviously, this sort of tonal direction is not going to be for everyone. People tend to like their comedies to make them fall out of their seats busting a gut, not make them embarrassed and perplexed by a person’s refusal to come clean and say the things they should. They want things broad and external, all those prickly internal human qualities like morality, honesty and integrity not the usual sort of building blocks that lead to broad-based comedic success.
Although ultimately very dissimilar animals, in a way Soderbergh’s opus has quite a bit in common with Jody Hill’s Observe and Report from earlier this year. Both these films put their viewers on the spot, forcing them to see pieces of themselves amidst all the insanity (or is that inanity?) they’d probably rather not spend too much time looking at. Their methods may be different and their points of view hardly similar but their effect is still reasonably the same, getting under the skin and making people think about things they’d rather not all part of their curious game.
Where Soderbergh succeeds and Hill did not is that he remembers that, no matter how uncomforting much of his tale can be, displaying all of these shenanigans is supposed to be at least a tiny bit of fun. He keeps the pace moving, the wheels turning and the energy level high, all the time assuming his audience has a brain and will be more than happy to be a part of, not just in on, the joke.
Without Damon none of this would work near as well as it does. This is the performance of his lifetime, maybe of the year. As good as he was in Good Will Hunting, as well-deserved as his Oscar nod for The Talented Mr. Ripley obviously was, his work as Mark Whitacre is truly extraordinary. From the deadpan delight of his free-flowing narration, to the sight of him fumbling over dollar amounts the average person can only imagine, every step he makes and every word he utters is absolute perfection.
Soderbergh’s other major assist comes from veteran Academy Award-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch (The Mirror Has Two Faces). His first official score in over a decade, to say each and every one of his ebulliently eccentric notes hits the spot would be a massive understatement. The music is an electric and alive counterpoint to all that is taking place onscreen, and I seriously doubt any of this charade would prove to be as powerful as it turns out to be without Hamlisch’s contribution.
Are audiences ready for something like The Informant!? In all fairness, I’m not sure I can really say. Even as much as I liked and respected the film, and as much as I flat-out adored certain factors like Damon’s performance or Hamlisch’s score, even I can’t say I enjoyed the finished product near as much as I felt like I wanted to.
But this movie is unique, funny and comes with its own distinctly original point of view. Soderbergh treats viewers with respect and assumes that they have a brain, and on subsequent viewings I can see this one growing from intriguing curiosity into full-blown classic like Mike Nichol’s Catch-22 or Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. While I’m not putting it on that plateau yet, for me The Informant! works, the truth of that statement authenticated in the fact I just don’t want to stop talking about it.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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