Steven Sodebergh has shot this deadpan, funny true-life farce about corporate chicanery in a kind of sick-yellow tone, like the colour of butter that's been left out in the sun too long. It's a neat and concise visual lick that suggests that there's something rotten at work here, in the corridors of America's power brokers. The settings of comfy hotel rooms, fluro-baked open plan workspaces and well-appointed offices aren’t folksy, but bland and antiseptic, and definitely heartless.
Still, any suggestion that this is going to be an angry movie about power and greed disappears once Marvin Hamlisch's ridiculously jaunty score kicks in, like elevator muzak warped into a cocktail time frenzy. Once the films titular anti-hero, Matt Damon, appears like some character in search of a feel-good comedy, Soderbergh's piss-takey tone takes hold and never lets up.
Losing his good looks behind a middle-age spread, a swooping razor cut wig, an Ed Flanders brush moustache, super-size spectacles, and baggy white-bread suit, Damon's Mark Whitacre is like a manic boy scout going for a merit badge in ethics. An executive and scientist at the US food giant Archer Daniels Midland of Decatur, Illinois, a small provincial city, Whitacre turns to the FBI when he finds ADM is part of a global price fixing scam. He starts wearing a wire to entrap the malefactors at ADM; meanwhile he buddies up with his G-men minders, Shepard (Scott Bakula), and Herndon (Joel McHale) who admire his bravery and selflessness and school him like a champ on a ball team headed for a pennant drive. Whitacre likes the spy stuff even if he shows no real élan for the gig (he feels that its helpful to 'narrate' the tapes, as in "I'm walking into the lobby now"¦")
Red flags on the operation rise early. Whitacre feels that in wiping out the bad guys he's clearing a top slot for himself in a new corporate culture at ADM, without realising that once the Feds, IRS and SEC get through there probably won't be an ADM. More than merely naïve, Whitacre is deeply delusional and his FBI pals quickly become sceptical: "What aren’t you telling us, Mark?" Whitacre turns out to be the worst kind of whistle-blower, a liar, con artist, and thief, whose sins jeopardise the FBI's half a billion dollar operation.
Whitacre was no ordinary crook and that's the juice and the fun of Soderbergh's very amusing film. The script by Scott Burns (and based on a factual book by Kurt Eichenwald) traps us inside Whitacre's do-gooding role-play fantasy. It's a good trick, since in part the movie is a satire on the way Hollywood films congratulate themselves for taking 'whistle-blowers' from fact and turning them into un-complicated heroes, and in the process fudge their messy and contradictory motivations. In other words, we want to believe that Whitacre is doing right and good, since that's what characters do in movies like this, right?
The big joke here is that the movie, like Whitacre, keeps switching on us; its starts out as a film about solving a crime only to become a movie about a criminal who starts out honest, who then used the FBI to disguise his own corruption, only to have the FBI confused about who to 'get' in the end, the 'bad' company or the naughty whistleblower?! It's ridiculous and that's the point.
Soderbergh’s sense of humour has always been wry and dry (Ocean’s 11) rather than thigh slappingly delirious. The Informant! is true to form. The jokes are kind of small and trivial. Soderbergh credits screenwriter Scott Z Burns with the film's best gag, Whitacre's 'confessional' voice-over. Traditionally, narration in movies like this one, smooth over transitions, explain fine detail, get us inside the character to tell us 'more'. Here, we are inside Whitacre's mind and that tells us precisely nothing about what's going on and even his thought processes seem weirdly skewed (he muses, at one point whether he should call his FBI agent minder by his first name). It's so funny, you don't notice it's the key clue to who Mark really is, a fantasist, completely absorbed in himself.
