4 out of 5

Directed by: Steve Soderbergh

I remember seeing The Informant! in theaters and realizing I’d seen something unique.  And that somewhere, in the same brain that had come to love offbeat comedies – the Coen brothers were up there; I was deep into my horror affection for things like Evil Dead and Dead Alive – I think I really loved the movie.  It wasn’t something I quite expected from Steve Soderbergh, whose name mainly attracted me to the flick, and who I identified as bouncing between more strictly indie projects and more accessible crowd-pleasing fare, but I admired the way The Informant! somehow hovered between those two extremes, plastered with an uncertain Why Me Worry? grimace, and liked that that same ambivalence confused me.  It was a bravely constructed film, clearly comical, but maybe not a comedy.

The problem was, I don’t know if anyone else in the theater felt the same way.  We all chuckled together at some more digestible moments, but Mark Whitacre’s (Matt Damon) ongoing, stream-of-ridiculousness narration was clearly distracting to people, steamrolling over the normal pit-a-pat pacing they were used to, and making for a quiet viewing experience.  I was visiting my parents and my brother, and I’d dragged them to the flick, and I know they didn’t like it.  I should have expected this – I had a great track record of voting for movies that no one else I end up watching it with enjoys – but their lukewarm reception combined with that of the rest of the theater-goers really made it hard to assess the movie.

Anecdotes like this aren’t really important, but it’s amusing to me how this synergizes with the movie, which has Whitacre playing whistleblower to a price-fixing scheme at the corporation, ADM, for which he works, eventually involving years worth of wire-wearing undercover work for the FBI.  The problem is – as we soon find out early in the film – Mark has a habit of making up things, and then confessing, but then making up more things.  The Informant! forms a series of escalations of this, where Mark gets people on his side of the story, takes them up to a point where he gets called out on an inconsistency, and then starts over with another set of people, and another story.  Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns track this over the downfall of ADM, and the feds, and several, lawyers, and reporters, and it’s fascinatingly batty stuff because… we don’t take a side.  Or rather, it’s presented as truth until it isn’t.

Initially, this presents a problem for the movie’s structure: Mark may have mental issues, and by the end of the movie, Soderbergh and Burns smartly allow for some reality to leak in.  It doesn’t make it into a drama, or make any big ‘point’ about matters, but it does make it human, and I don’t know that this could have been accomplished without playing everything leading up to that so straight-faced and light hearted, with zippy music (Marvin Hamlisch – though appreciably staying far from pastiche) and clear but muted cinematography edging us toward a carefree vibe, even as Whitacre sort of walks himself toward the self-destruction of losing his job.  However, why there’s that moment of grace toward the end, there’s nothing that can balance it out to start: we’re just dropped into the lie that kicks off Mark’s involvement with things.  And so Soderbergh and Burns dance around it somewhat; it’s not even clear what is the lie, or whether there’s a lie at all.  This is part of the point, but no matter how many times I watch the movie, I’m still caught out by how little context we’re given initially.

Damon is amazing.  The balance in the performance, of playing this person who was both kind of a dumdum and kind of a genius both sympathetically and allowing us to laugh at him, is an insane masterwork of nuance.  And the casting – with many comedians in straight roles – is inspired, again playing into concepts of perception.   And somewhere in here, you realize it’s a true story and that Mark is a real person and it becomes even more insane: both the tale itself, and the way it was successfully fictionalizied into prime entertainment.