MOVIE REVIEW – The Informant!

The Informant!
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, based on the book by Kurt Eichenwald
Producers: Michael Jaffe, Howard Braunstein, Kurt Eichenwald, Jennifer Fox, Gregory Jacobs
Stars: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Tom Papa, Rick Overton, Ann Cusack

When Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) describes FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) as “a good listener”; it is all but a declaration of love at first sight. Whitacre himself is not much of a listener, at least to others – his brain is racing full-time with shifting thoughts, trivial musings, and self-aggrandizement. He is speaking with Agent Shepard in order to become a corporate whistleblower, and will spend three years undercover at his own company, collecting evidence of a billion-dollar fraud. The Agent and his partner (Joel McHale) marvel at Whitacre’s ability to live two lives.

What they fail to understand it that this is not a torture to him, but a dream come true. The Informant! – based on the gripping book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald – is about a man who stopped living just one life a long time ago. In the life most people see he is a dweebish but highly-capable biochemist rising through the corporate ranks of ADM, one of the world’s largest food-products manufacturers. They can do things with an ear of corn that would startle you. But Whitacre has other lives – more fantastical, grandiose ones – as an orphan who made good out of some Dickensian turns of fortune, or as a guy with a swell idea for a TV show; and now, thanks to Agent Shepard, he gets to be the chipper, downstate version of Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Eichenwald’s book about the real-life price-fixing case built on the foundation of Whitacre’s testimony and wire recordings is an addictive read, because just as the intrigue about the case settles into procedure, the secret intrigue around Whitacre begins to unfurl itself. It earns its page-turning power because of how unbelievable is each successive act and revelation, how it makes you realize how little you can really know someone.

What filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has done is to seize on that essential truth, and bring all his prodigious tools to work mining it. The Informant! is not a follower on the path of Michael Mann’s The Insider, which another filmmaker might have made, but rather is an awesome cinematic joke, a pie in the face of America’s self-deluding hero complex, resting on a performance by Matt Damon free from all physical or psychological vanity.

Whitacre has a large house in Decatur, Illinois, several expensive cars, and a humble and endlessly-loyal wife played by a quietly superb Melanie Lynskey. At the office he comes off as well-meaning if gauche, technically-versed but given to flashes of awkward temperament. When he reports to his superiors that one of their plants has fallen victim to industrial sabotage, and that an executive from a Japanese rival is asking for a healthy bribe to make their problems go away, it is taken seriously enough that they call in the Feds.

And it is in a moment of desperate conscience that Whitacre confesses to the Agent who comes to this house that he has been involved for years in a worldwide scheme to fix the price of lysine, an amino acid with uses everywhere along the food-making chain. Stealing five extra cents a day from every American at their breakfast table turns out to add up to a pretty nice sum after awhile. He volunteers to help record the secret, informal meetings held in drab hotel conference rooms around the globe.

As a procedural, The Informant is plenty entertaining just because it feels so minutely ordinary and real. So many thrillers and cop shows boil down to gadget porn – investigators working out of cavernous, moodily-lit spaces with more flat screen monitors than a sports bar, using sci-fi technology that has lots of colors and beeping noises. Whitacare has a briefcase with a tape recorder inside it – one that doesn’t work reliably, at that. This feels much more like what a government budget would buy. And one can never imagine a high-stakes surveillance in something like 24 getting threatened because someone moved a lamp in front of the video camera.

But this is just one layer of the story – the other is about Whitacre’s crowded inner life. And it’s on this level that the first half of the movie plays like an inscrutable aesthetic puzzle. Composer Marvin Hamlisch’s score won’t seem like a triumph initially – it is loud, insistent, and feels forty years behind the times with its alternately jaunty and ominous arrangements, its way of commenting directly on action rather than complementing it. The more you understand Whitacre, though, the more you realize that this is the soundtrack in his own brain, the more wickedly amazing it is. Soderbergh has both the imagination to conceive of his specific treatment of the story, and the technical mastery to execute it so smoothly you barely notice the second half of the movie until it starts clubbing you like a clown with a stuffed sock.

Psychologists describe narcissism as a black hole that sucks in those around the narcissist. In The Informant!, Soderbergh and Damon show us how Whitacre’s place as the point-man in this groundbreaking case fed all his brain’s worst impulses, and how everyone around him got hitched to a train that wasn’t going the direction they thought it was. It is a comedy of frustration, about a man who believes he is outsmarting everyone long after he has already scripted his own undoing. You can see the agony in Agent Shepard – Bakula plays it so earnestly, perfectly square – as he struggles to understand why Whitacre would do the things he’s doing. Whitacre can’t answer – if he did, we might stop listening.