By Dan Cohen
“The Informant!,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon is as irritating as it is interesting. But it’s still worth seeing.
Based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, an executive who cooperated with an FBI investigation of price fixing at the behemoth Archer Daniels Midland company, it suffers from the kind of identity crisis that keeps it teetering on the edge of disaster. You come away from it scratching your head, wishing it had been better, but still glad for having seen it.
The TV ads make “The Informant” seem like a high spirited comedy. There’s even an exclamation point in the title. The producers, and perhaps the studio, have gone to great lengths to sell it as a romp. That may be because the prevailing Hollywood wisdom holds that to attract a large audience a movie has to fall into one of the easily categorized genres. Comedy, action, horror; one of those. The execs know from bad experience what happens when a film confuses people. And these days the word “drama” is the equivalent of box office poison. But this time, in spite of their efforts, the result is a truly confusing movie.
First, a little about the story. Mark Whitacre was hired by the huge biochemical company Archer Daniels Midland in 1989. He was the youngest division manager in its history. ADM was, and still is, the foremost manufacturer of high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener used in a zillion food products, that positively trumps sugar in terms of cost effectiveness. We don’t grow much sugar in this country, but we produce abundant corn. ADM has taken full advantage of this. Beyond that they have successfully lobbied congress to artificially prop up the price of sugar, both here and abroad. So they keep their competition in check.
Whitacre had Fortune 500 experience before coming to ADM. He went to Cornell. He had lived in Germany, spoke fluent German, and had traveled extensively through Asia. He appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine as a likely candidate to run the entire corporation. He was a heavy hitter.
In the early 90s he cooperated with an FBI investigation regarding global price fixing. The FBI’s probe went on for three years. When things got hot, Whitacre confessed to having embezzled at least 9 million dollars from ADM. As the truth continued to emerge his story kept changing, until he became a principal suspect.
He ended up spending eight years in federal prison. More than the several others who were convicted. He has variously been described as a criminal, a hero, bi-polar, insane, a victim of corporate skullduggery and a pathological liar. Amazingly, after all those years locked up, he became chief operating officer of a big biochemical company, Cypress, that does important research on cancer. He got the job only a short time after being released.
At least two books have been written about the guy, one by a New York Times reporter, and another by a lawyer. The books take very different views of his behavior. You’d think there would be a fascinating movie in this. Somehow the result is tepid.
The script is partially to blame. It’s painfully straightforward. At bottom there’s nothing daring or outrageous about the writing or the direction, and in fact, the movie fails to depict many of the crazier things Whitacre is alleged to have done, like using a gas powered leaf blower to clear his driveway during a thunderstorm, at 3 AM. It hints at his madness without really exploring it.
The events are accompanied by Whitacre’s narration, which is a lot more interesting than the dialogue. Still, for most of the movie he and his colleagues are portrayed as dimwits, to the point where they are almost singularly uninteresting. Surely these men, (Whitacre included) were not village idiots. Then, more than halfway through the movie, as Whitacre’s own indiscretions come to light, it’s revealed that he is an altogether different character than the one we’ve been listening to all along.
Suddenly, a guy who’s been portrayed, as an ordinary fool, is shown to be a lot more complicated. It turns out that we have been duped, but not in a way that challenges us, in a way that makes us wonder whether the creators of this movie ever had a sense of what they were trying to do with the story. So the movie is a schizoid as its lead character.
Several talented comics, Rick Overton, Allan Havey, and Patton Oswalt, take important roles. Scott Bakula, an actor who’s often shown an ability to play irony, is the FBI man leading the probe. But their lines are mostly perfunctory; and mostly humorless. Melanie Lynskey, a fine actress who has appeared regularly in “Two and a Half Men,” has a thankless, one dimensional role as the wife. The score, which sometimes sounds like it was borrowed from a childrens’ film, is used to milk humor from scenes that lack a comic edge, both in their writing and directing.
The saving grace here is Matt Damon, who put on 30 plus pounds to play the lead, and clearly took every underwritten moment and worked it for all it was worth. His inspired performance keeps the movie alive when all else fails. And then there’s the story, which is so interesting it somehow rises above the banal treatment.
It’s hard to see what the prolific and proficient Steven Soderbergh actually contributed beyond a coherent narrative flow. But whatever it was, it lacks passion.
Soderbergh’s best work as a director has been in polished, high-end entertainment, like “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Erin Brokovich,” and the movie adaptation of the British TV miniseries, “Traffic.” He also directed the under rated and under loved classic, “King of the Hill,” which you need to see on DVD!
But his more free form projects, like “Bubble,” “Full Frontal,” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” have not measured up to his ambitions as an author of original work. It’s odd, but when given a free hand he’s failed to deliver the sort of daring movies he seems driven to make. He has often delivered more in terms of inspired filmmaking in his commercial projects.
Another problem: As he has in many of his projects, Soderbergh served as Director of Photography, under the assumed name of Peter Andrews. Most of the time, his double duty has served his projects well. This time it doesn’t. “The Informant!” has a murky, under-lit and sometimes monochromatic cast that seems to suck the visual energy out of it, underserving the actors. Why?
The material in “The Informant” was ripe for daring and imagination. With insanity nipping at its character’s heels it offered the promise of Kubrick’s “Strangelove,” or, had it gone in another direction a Billy Wilder farce like “One Two Three.” Why didn’t the material reach higher? Was somebody—the producers, the studio, the writers—standing in its way? You really wonder. See it anyway.
