The Informant!

Price-fixing in agro-business may not seem like an obvious topic for a black comedy, but then Steven Soderbergh has rarely chosen the obvious path in his career. And although refusing to be pigeonholed has meant that Soderbergh’s output, at least in the last five years, has been decidedly mixed, thankfully The Informant! is something of a return to form.

Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a director at Midwestern agricultural firm ADM who comes to the attention of the FBI in the early ’90s after reporting corporate malpractice at the upper levels of his firm. Whitacre doesn’t so much blow the whistle as play the entire wind section on the shady goings-on at ADM. Unfortunately, the FBI agent assigned to the case (Scott Bakula) doesn’t realise what’s really going on with Whitacre until it’s far too late.

To say any more would ruin one of the film’s chief joys, which is sharing the FBI’s growing awareness of Whitacre’s unreliability as the plot thickens. Based on a true story, The Informant! skips from country to country and boardroom to boardroom in a narrative that would be almost incomprehensible had Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z Burns not paid so much attention to it.

The film’s main focus is Whitacre himself – a deluded fantasist puffed up with his own importance to the FBI’s investigation. Whether fiddling with his wire-tapped briefcase during a business meeting or giving a deadpan account of his journey into the office to his hidden microphone, Whitacre cuts a dangerously idiotic, self-obsessed figure. With a down-home manner and a short attention span he’s a sort of cross between David Brent and Forrest Gump. Big laughs come from the film’s repeated tendency of fading out from the action and instead listening in on the bizarre non-sequiturs running through Whitacre’s head, taking in everything from polar bears to Japanese vending machines.

Soderbergh keeps things light-hearted even when the narrative turns dark in the film’s final third, playing up the comedy with some well-observed period touches and a jaunty score from Marvin Hamlisch. But much of the credit for The Informant!’s success should be given to Damon. Chubby, bewigged and sporting a goofy pencil moustache, the actor catches Whitacre’s mixture of naivety and self-importance to perfection. After the straight-faced brawn of the Bourne trilogy, it’s easy to forget that Damon is a talented character actor. The Informant! might be too feather-light to bring him the plaudits he deserves, but it’s to his credit that this is one of the most enjoyable films in months.

Dan Stewart

Anticipation:

Looks like a comic version of The Insider. Could be boring.

Enjoyment:

Who knew exposing corporate malpractice could be this much fun?

In Retrospect:

A great performance by Damon. Deserves the exclamation mark in the title.