Movies: The Informant * * * *
(15A, General release)
Friday November 20 2009
Stranger than fiction
In The Informant, Steven Soderbergh achieves a very delicate balancing act. The film’s story is so bizarre in a banal sort of a way that it constantly threatens to collapse into farce, but Soderbergh and his leading man Matt Damon never allow that to happen and, as a consequence. give us an entertaining, cleverly paced and intriguing tragi-comedy.
Like all the weirdest stories, the adventures of Mark Whitacre are true. He was a rising corporate star at an Illinois-based food industry multinational called Archer Daniels Midland in the early 90s, when he became the focus of an elaborate three-year FBI undercover operation.
As played by Matt Damon, Whitacre initially seems such a regular guy that he’s all but invisible. He strides into work with puppyish zeal, spouts the kind of corporate platitudes that get you places, has a loving, mousey wife and kids and a modestly plush house in the suburbs.
But life has other plans for Mark than middle management anonymity, and when the FBI arrive at Archer Daniels Midland to investigate a possible case of espionage, he seems to suddenly grow a backbone.
With the encouragement of his wife, he approaches an agent called Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) with some incendiary claims. Mark tells Agent Shepard that he has witnessed and been involved in organised price-fixing of the key agri-additive lysine, that amounts to a multi-million dollar case of international fraud. Shepard and his colleague Robert Herndon (Joel McHale, of E! channel’s The Soup) are very interested, and over the next three years Mark Whitacre becomes their informant and inside man in an increasingly complex investigation.
Agents Herndon and Shepard grow fond of Mark, and his endearing, puppyish ways, but as the plot thickens they begin to notice that he’s becoming grandiose and borderline deluded.
They also discover that he has been somewhat economical with the truth, and when the case is about to go public in 1995, it’s ready to collapse like a house of cards.
Matt Damon the action hero we’re very familiar with, courtesy of the Bourne films, and very good at it he is too, but in The Informant he reveals a whole new dimension to his acting, and delivers a devilishly subtle and unobvious portrait of a character who’s extremely hard to put your finger on.
It’s a delightful turn, as he grows into his role to his fingertips, and sums him up with an eloquent walk that’s simultaneously assertive and hesitant.
- Paul Whitington
