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Friday, September 18, 2009
Matt Damon transforms into The Informant!
When director Steven Soderbergh flipped a shot upside down early in The Informant!, that told me two things: that I couldn’t quite trust what the movie told me, and that I was in for a memorable ride. The first great film of the fall has arrived.
In telling the story of whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, a Warren County native who fingered his employer in a giant price-fixing scheme, the movie takes a great risk in asking its audience to laugh at a true story of a mentally ill character. The gambit works, thanks largely to an Oscar-caliber performance from Matt Damon, who makes Whitacre troubled, devious and sympathetic all at once.
In 1992, Whitacre informed on the agricultural giant ADM, agreeing to spy on the company’s questionable practices for the FBI. Whitacre gets so caught up in his role, at one point he calls himself 0014, “because I’m twice as smart as James Bond,” he brags.
As it turns out, Whitacre is not exactly innocent himself, having embezzled from the company. When this comes to light, Whitacre, increasingly dogged by bipolar disorder, concocts an elaborate web of lies that eventually derails his life.
Some may call The Informant! a jauntier version of Erin Brockovich, another Soderbergh film about corporate malfeasance, and that comparison is apt. However, the movie also reminded me of Michael Clayton, which Soderbergh executive produced. Like that George Clooney vehicle, The Informant! takes place in the present day (at least as much as you can say the 90s are the present), but it has the look, feel and even the sound of a movie made in the 1970s.
Soderbergh, who as usual photographed the movie himself under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, gives the images a hazy quality indicative of Whitacre’s elusive grip on reality, and the claustrophobic shots heighten Whitacre’s sense of anxiety.
The movie’s great masterstroke, though, is the bright, trilling score by Marvin Hamlisch. The composer did much of his great work in the 1970s, but Hamlisch exaggerates the sound so that the music smacks of a 1970s TV commercial. The hyper-happy tone ingeniously underscores Whitacre’s ridiculous stories, making for a sharp satire.
But is Whitacre’s predicament supposed to be funny? The real story certainly wasn’t. And yet, the audience I saw the movie with laughed frequently and loudly. So did I. And I didn’t feel guilty about that in the end.
The movie isn’t laughing at Whitacre himself or at his disorder. It’s laughing at how surreal the whole ordeal seemed. It’s a fine line to walk, but The Informant! never loses balance, because the screenplay by Scott Z. Burns is so sharp, and especially because Damon always keeps Whitacre’s humanity.
Much attention will be paid, and rightly so, to Damon’s remarkable physical transformation - it’s hard to believe this relentlessly awkward guy is the same actor who played Jason Bourne - but Damon’s emotional intensity grounds the picture. It’s an absolutely top-notch performance.
Like some of Soderbergh’s other movies, The Informant! sometimes gets so caught up in being clever it comes across as a little cold at times. Regardless, I believed in The Informant!, even if, and maybe even because I could never quite believe Mark Whitacre.
GRADE: A
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