The Informant! (2009) Movie Review

With the release of The Informant!, Oscar winning director Steven Soderbergh ends this very busy decade (his 13th movie released since 2000, 14th of you count the interminable Che into 2 parts) on a winning note. I realize that corporate malfeasance really isn’t the best subject for laughter especially in this day and age, but see The Informant! and just try to stifle laughter while watching Rosie O’ Damon try to bumble his way out of a hole that seems to have no bottom, mostly as a result of his chuckleheaded ineptness and greed. It’s one of those movies that makes you want to read the novel it’s based upon, just to see which parts are bullshit and which aren’t.

Yes, it’s based on a true...well, truish story of a guy named Mark Whitacre, but some facts were fudged for storytelling purposes. By the time the end credits roll, you realize it’s the only way the story could be told. Hey, Inglourious Basterds and Frost/Nixon fudged with the facts too and they turned out pretty well.

It’s the early 90’s and Mark Whitacre (a very unBourne Matt Damon, looking like he’s trying out for a Seth Rogen biopic) is a young high-up executive for the Archer Daniels Midland company in Midwest Illinois. I’m not exactly sure what the company does but the odds are that most of the food you buy has been touched by ADM as it has something to with processed corn and lysine, ingredients found in most of the stuff we buy off the shelf (just look at a label). ADM is #45 on the Fortune 500 but because of a “virus” leveling off lysine production it could drop to #46 (at a loss of $7 million a month). The big white bosses do not want that to happen.

It’s Mark’s job to make sure it doesn’t.

After a while, Mark comes back and reports that there may be a mole destroying the levels on his/her own hired by another company for corporate sabotage. He knows this because someone from Japan tipped him off...or so he says.

ADM brings in their legal counsel to try to weed out the mole and sooner rather than later the FBI is involved.

For whatever reason this makes Mark very, very nervous. His dutiful wife Ginger (Heavenly Creatures’ Melanie Lynskey) thinks he should tell the truth. Truth about what?

Mark goes to the FBI and confesses that ADM is involved with illegal corporate price fixing with its own competitors, fucking over the consumer on the regular while raking in the millions every quarter. Mark wants to do the right thing...but still wants to keep his job at ADM even after they’re taken down, a scenario that makes sense to no one but Mark Whitacre.

It’s okay, because it doesn’t need to make sense to anyone but Mark because we learn as the film goes on...that Mark lives a world all his own.

What works with The Informant!-

1) In his first starring role in over 2 years, Matt Damon reminds why he’s light years ahead career-wise of his conjoined twin Ben Affleck, as it’s the funniest work he’s ever done. Think of Whitacre as a mixture of Tom Ripley, Colin Sullivan of The Departed, and Linus Caldwell with a persecution complex (“It’s always dump on Mark Whitacre”) minus long-term survival skills ...and add 35 pounds. Mark’s just a guy that wants to be loved and rich but is too dense at times to know which one he should be after at which time. Like Kanye, Mark really doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up (“I think I should go back to the Hospital”) or listen to his Inner Monologue.

2) A scene in a parking lot involving the aftermath of a raid is one of the rewind-reset worthy scenes of 2009 (“Who else did you tell?”). As the FBI Agent playing Whitacre’s main handler, Scott Bakula’s (still hoping Lord of Illusions makes him a huge movie star) expressions during this scene are priceless.

3) It took me a while to realize this as I was watching it...but the actor playing ADM’s head of security is Tom Wilson. If you don’t recognize that you may recognize Biff Tannen. Wilson was Biff in Back to the Future, and I haven’t seen him in jack shit since so there was no natural age progression onscreen as we usually see with actors who, you know, work every once in a while. I don’t think I’m the only one in the audience who thought (if anyone else actually recognized him) “Fuck...that’s Biff...and Biff is old”. Gotta wonder if Soderbergh or Matt Damon made him say “MacFly, HELLO,” while knocking on someone’s head as a condition of getting hired.

4) Most of Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay should be put to audio somehow as it’s a hoot to hear Damon’s voice-over as Mark soliloquizes over such diverse topics as Polar bear noses, Butterflies wings, and the capital of Saskatchewan. You laugh as you watch the movie, but everything is happening too fast to catch every detail...and it’s worth hearing.

5) The background music- think 70’s commercial jingles.

6) Mark watching The Firm as if Tom Cruise is going to give him any answers.

What doesn’t work-

1) Everything in the movie is shot in such a breezy inconsequential way that it’s difficult to really care what’s going on other than waiting for the next laugh as almost every character is treated like a cartoon. It almost makes one wonder what the movie would have been like (not that I’d change any frame of this one) if it had been played as a drama.

Overall. With The Informant! and last spring’s The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh has directed 2 of the best movies of 2009. Don’t let Damon’s 80’s porn moustache or Brandoish paunch frighten you off as the movie’s as lean as he isn’t. With Zombieland two weeks away, The Informant’s the funniest thing you’ve got going for the rest of the month that doesn’t star Megan Fox. I promise. And unlike Mark Whitacre, not everything that comes out of my mouth is a lie...most of the time.