By Eric Eisenberg
When you get past the smaller details, there are two reasons people lie – to protect someone’s feelings and for personal gain. The former, also known as white lies, are told when grandma gives you a pair of tube socks for Christmas or you tell your wife that you would rather go clothes shopping than play golf with your friends. The latter can come in a range of sizes, be it telling your boss you are sick to get out of work or defrauding a major corporation for millions of dollars. Mark Whitacre, Matt Damon’s character in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, certainly falls in to the second category.
It should be said, off the bat, that despite its marketing, the film is not a straight comedy, but rather a character piece. Where the laughs do come are, generally, at the expense of the character’s decisions rather than their dialogue or physical action. Instead, the audience simply marvels at the web of intricacies that the main character has established.
In the film, Matt Damon plays the afore mentioned Mark Whitacre, a high level executive at ADM, one of the largest agricultural conglomerates in the world. After learning that the company has been fixing its prices with its competitors and discovering that he may be getting set up to take the fall, Whitacre decides to become an informant for the FBI. Paired with FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula), Whitacre begins to tape conversations, videotape meetings and expose the head executives of the company for their violations of anti-trust laws. What the FBI is not aware of, however, is what else Whitacre has been up to.
Damon, of course, leads the show in a costume eerily reminiscent of Gene Hackman’s in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. While not exactly stretching his range in the role, he possesses the perfect level of charm to convince everyone in the room that he is their friend all while stabbing them in the back. It would seem that he believes that he is Tom Cruise’s character in The Firm, always one step ahead of everyone else, until he finds himself a few miles back. Providing only half-truths and all out lies to just about everyone around him, including immediate family, Damon is able to sell the character because he has such a trustable look. If George Clooney or Jack Nicholson were to be cast, the movie would be over in five minutes with the jail guard walking away with the key as the credits roll.
What is most perplexing about the film is its cast which is filled with some of the funniest comedic actors working today, such as Tom Papa, Joel McHale, Patton Oswalt, and Paul F. Tompkins. This would make perfect sense, as the film should and is categorized as a comedy, but for one detail: all of them are playing out the more serious roles. Playing government officials, FBI agents, or ADM executives, there is not a funny line between them. Perhaps it would take multiple viewings to understand or maybe Soderbergh is trying to say something, but the only funny that comes out of any of them is the occasional blank stare.
Also troubling the film is its structure. The bulk of the film’s positive aspects come in the third act, leaving the first two acts, when Whitacre turns informant and begins collecting evidence, to struggle. This is largely because rather than being the Inspector Clouseau of informants, Whitacre is actually fairly brilliant in getting people to say exactly what they are doing and positioning them so that the camera can see their pretty faces. It is not until the FBI establishes its case against ADM that everything in the film really starts to move forward and by that time the most attention span-lacking audiences may lose all interest, no matter how enchanted they are by Damon’s performance.
Mark Whitacre must be one of the most interesting people on Earth and Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns do an impressive job of capturing him. If it weren’t for the film’s marketing, which sold it as a standard Hollywood comedy, it would have exceeded expectation rather than undershooting them. There are certainly some hilarious and laugh out loud scenes in the film, and it should be recommended, provided the viewer goes in with the right idea.
© Eric Eisenberg, All Rights Reserved