Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! playfully tells the true
story of a corporate whistleblower who does a miserable yet strangely
effective job of helping the FBI investigate an international
price-fixing scheme.

Soderbergh wants to be more humorous than dramatic with his
depiction of the actual corporate crime that occurred in the ’90s.
Thanks to an understated and hilarious performance by Matt Damon, he
succeeds.

Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a former employee of Archer Daniels
Midland, the maker of various soybean and food-oil products, and one of
our nation’s biggest corporations. Whitacre is interviewed by a
well-meaning FBI agent (Scott Bakula) about a possible blackmail scheme
at ADM. At the urging of his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), Whitacre
decides to let the FBI know about an international price-fixing scheme
that is costing consumers untold amounts of money. The FBI asks
Whitacre to help them gather proof, and thus starts one of the stranger
stories in American corporate history.

Whitacre really takes to the idea of becoming an informant and
wearing a wire. He fancies himself as some sort of secret agent, and
naively thinks his company will make him president when the dust
settles. The way he figures it, nobody will be left standing after all
of the corporate criminals are sniffed out, and ADM will need him to
crawl out of the rubble and take the company forward.

As history tells us, that didn’t happen. Whitacre eventually went to
jail for corporate crimes committed while he was working with the FBI.
In fact, his sentence was longer than those received by the executives
who were taken down in the price-fixing scheme.

As portrayed by Damon, Whitacre is a classic cinematic buffoon.
Damon put on 30 extra pounds (not to mention a bad mustache) for the
role. The extra weight doesn’t necessarily make him look fat … just a
little less Matt Damon-y. It doesn’t qualify as Damon’s most startling
physical transformation for a movie role; the man lost 40 pounds to
play a drug-addicted soldier in Courage Under Fire.

While the weight gain got a lot of press, it’s Damon’s hilarious
voiceover that really makes the movie shine. Whitacre provides an often
trivial commentary, going off the subject and inserting random facts
and asides that have nothing to do with what’s happening onscreen.
Damon’s Whitacre doesn’t treat the events he’s narrating in the film
with any level of seriousness.

The goofy voiceover could be viewed as Soderbergh and Damon
satirizing the typical audience handholding that occurs when a film is
too complicated to be taken at face value. (This one is not.) It could
also be seen as a hint regarding the nature of Whitacre’s character. As
his lies and deceptions mount, he reveals himself to be an unreliable
informant, as well as an unreliable narrator.

Soderbergh wisely casts a lot of comedians in supporting roles. Joel
McHale (Talk Soup), Andrew Daly (Upright Citizens Brigade), Paul
F. Tompkins (Mr. Show), the Smothers brothers and Tony Hale
(Arrested Development) are all required to play it straight.
Watching them react to Whitacre’s bizarre antics is a hoot, and seeing
all of these comedians in the cast helps reinforce the entire situation
as a massive comedy of errors. That tone is further helped by the
quirky Marvin Hamlisch score, which suggests a sort of ’70s Neil Simon
comedy vibe, even though the film is set in the ’90s.

The Informant! takes a risky, off-kilter approach to a story
that could’ve played out like an average corporate thriller. Leave it
to Soderbergh and Damon to find the wicked humor in something that
resulted in the largest antitrust fine in U.S. history at the time, and
a lot of bilked international consumers. As seen here, Mark Whitacre
was a manipulative, sneaky, smug son of a bitch. Thanks to Damon, he’s
also a highly entertaining tragicomic figure.

This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2009.