Film Review: The Informant! (Spoilers)

Director Steven Soderbergh fluctuates between two extremes – the diabolically bad (Ocean’s 12/Solaris) or all-time great (Ocean’s 11/Erin Brockovich). ‘The Informant!’ doesn’t exactly sit between the two, but although it’s very good, it doesn’t reach the highest heights either. That’s not because it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be – it’s an embellished adaptation of the story of real life corporate informant Mark Whitacre, who went whistle-blower against ADM’s lysine price-fixing in the early 90s. And Soderbergh gets everything right which The Men Who Stare At Goats got wrong – he plays what could otherwise be a dull and nigh unfilmable story for gentle laughs, finding humour in the urbane, gently overexaggerating Whitacre’s character into a white collar criminal figure of fun. And Matt Damon positively radiates as Whitacre, transforming himself into a stocky caricature of a man who’s hard to pin down – is he blowing the whistle on ADM for altruistic reasons or does he have his own agenda?

It’s an amazing story – Damon/Whitacre believing he could step up to the ADM leadership through his many years as an FBI informant against them, yet conveniently never telling the FBI of the millions of dollars he was simultaneously embezzling. It’s a difficult story to balance, but Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z Burns mostly pull it off, wisely not trying to come to any fixed conclusions about Whitacre, and it strengthens their movie. Was he playing ADM and the FBI off against each other for his own benefit or was he undone by the vastly more powerful ADM? Damon impressively keeps you guessing throughout, managing to portray Whitacre as deeply sympathetic and benign, finding a rich and engaging comic seam in his behaviour, which he balances out nicely with his ever more bizarre behaviour as the case is pursued by the Justice Department. And he’s aided by fantastic production and a killer, classic store by Marvin Hamlisch, adding just the right tone to a story full of paradoxes.

Ultimately the subject matter is a little too bland, the results of the investigation not grand enough for this to hit the heights of Brockovich. But it’s an interesting and very finely observed character piece, which should set Damon up for a much broader career than just the Bourne action stereotype.

8/10

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