The Informant! (2009)

Offbeat movie that, with limited success, tries to make light of some serious stuff involving corporate corruption at the highest managerial levels. What makes this even more significant is that the events dramatized in this movie are supposedly based on actual events which, if true, calls into question the reliability of witnesses in criminal investigations who themselves are criminals. Embezzlement and fraud are serious crimes, but when a person committing such serious crimes becomes a star witness for a full-blown government investigation targeting a major international corporation, then this cast a huge, dark shadow over the credibility of criminal investigation itself. This movie is also about to what lengths government officials are willing to believe such unsavory informants even as these informants continue to flagrantly break numerous laws. Matt Damon gives an excellent performance as the main character, Mark Whitacre, a man who on his own initiative feeds the government information while he continues to embezzle huge sums of money. The movie shows how the government almost becomes complicit in Whitacre's's criminal behavior and how it causes an incredible and irreparable amount of damage. Does being an informant absolve one of guilt for crimes committed? Watch the movie and find out.

Fmovies: I suppose I will always find something to like in a Soderbergh movie. The real joy is in never knowing just what that will be. Even in his most mainstream projects he is exploring some new skill. Here it is the notion of narration.

I'll have to see this a second time with a DVD stop button to be able to fully catalog all the various modes that our filmmaker skips seamlessly through. The main device he weaves these modes around is the spine of the untrusted narrator. We have all sorts of layers and nodes of deception with the only ones we can really trust being the guys usually are the bottom of the garbage bin: the massive greedy company.

We have this fellow being dishonest to everyone, including himself. We have no idea where the line is that he actually believes and we hear only from him. Some of the internal dialog is hypnotizing: we are lulled into accepting it because so much of it is appealingly funny. It is a great trick of misdirection, allowing us to associate with this slippery reality.

Folded into this is are the watchers, nominally the FBI, then various lawyers and the wife, but us of course, punctuated by a video at the end directly to us (with the FBI behind a mirror).

A second surprise awaited me beyond the Soderbergh stretching. Matt Damon finally does something impressive. He is truly something worth watching here. I never would have guessed. I never would have believed. In fact, this wouldn't have worked at all, this suspended belief within the story, if he had not so believably become the character.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

The true story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) who worked for a giant firm that produced lysine chemicals in products to be consumed by humans. Whitacre maintained a degree of honesty and integrity to his work, but when he uncovered evidence of price fixing with rival foreign companies, he turned undercover informant for the FBI...but, as events rolled on, it would appear he may have known a bit more about what was going on himself than he was letting on.

Playing like a lighter version of 1999's The Insider, Steven Soderbergh's dramatization of corporate corruption in the early 90s is amusingly on edge through-out, with Damon's constant muted voice-overs gently guiding us along this tale of principles and ethics clashing with corporate greed and deception. Damon is affable enough in the lead role (certainly hard to think of any actor who could have done it better) and the story is pretty relevant and dynamic. There's nothing about it that really makes it unforgettable or brilliant, but it's certainly worth a bit of your time. ***

The Informant! fmovies. Greetings again from the darkness. Steven Soderbergh is a genius with a camera. Just admiring the shots, angles and movement of the camera in his films is worth the price of admission. Here we get a fact-based story from the book by Kurt Eichenwald showing us what happened when Mark Whitacre became one of the most famous corporate whistle-blowers of all time ... he exposed price-fixing at Archer Daniels Midland, the ag-giant.

Matt Damon takes this quasi-caricature and turns him into a comedy act along the lines of Jim Carrey in Liar, Liar. OK, I'll admit, there is more subtlety here than in that one. Still, the voice-overs by Damon's character provide the ramblings of a madman - an ADD, embezzling madman.

There is so much comedy here that it is easy to forget what heinous crimes the senior management of this company actually committed - and how arrogant to think they could get away with it. This again shows that many in the corporate world are the equals of even the most corrupt politicians. Power and Greed are all-consuming.

While, I don't know the details of the real story, it was interesting to watch Whitacre's interacting/playing with the FBI agents (Scott Bacula and Joel McHale). They want to believe him and are actually crushed when his game is exposed.

A real Soderbergh touch is the casting of both Smothers Brothers in unrelated roles. Very nice. It is very difficult for me to believe that someone as intelligent and shrewd as Whitacre could actually be so, well, goofy. But it does add an entertainment element to the film. I will say it is not at the level of far superior "The Insider" or even "Catch Me if You Can", but it is quite watchable.

I think this might be Damons best performance since the Good Will Hunting movie. At least it felt to me like that. And I'm not saying that to put movies like Bourne or Oceans down, they are a lot of fun (on different levels), but performance wise he didn't have to stretch that many "muscles" (action wise on the other hand, he obviously had to, at least with the Bourne Trilogy).

The story is pretty simple and the anti "Hero" is quite ordinary. Which might make it less appealing to a large audience, but it wasn't aimed to crack the box office. Soderbergh captures a weird feeling in this movie, that leaves you with a weird taste at the end. Of course, you could argue, that the movie shows too little of Damons wife, maybe even too little of his employer. But as it is, it's a pretty solid and greatly edited work.

Even the voice over, which seems and is completely out of place, works really good in this movie. I guess even the Team America members would change their opinion of "Matt Damon" after watching this one. Give it a try, but don't expect laugh out loud comedy (not the ordinary kind that is).

At its core, The Informant! is, by no means, an inherently funny story. It involves international corporate conspiracies, corruption, deception and betrayal. Yet somehow, Steven Soderbergh manages to turn Kurt Eichenwald's book, which depicts the true story of former ADM employee Mark Whitacre in the manner of John Grisham's best legal thrillers, into a thoroughly entertaining, often very funny movie. This, of course, is aided by Matt Damon's brilliant, spot-on portrayal of the corporate executive-turned-FBI informant, as well as solid work by the supporting cast.

When I first read Eichenwald's book after learning about this movie, I was slightly skeptical. Economics and law are far from my forte. However, what I found was a story so ridiculous and told in such a compelling way that it was difficult to put the book down. Especially for a nonfiction story, the characters felt so well-developed and so three-dimensional that you cannot help but care immensely about them, despite their flaws. And then, I heard that Soderbergh planned to make the movie version into a dark comedy. Given some of the subject matter and material involved, I was worried that the film would turn into too much of a farce and would not give the real-life story and people the proper respect.

To my utter relief, I was wrong. While some of the darker elements have been left out and the film is undoubtedly lighter than its source material, Soderbergh stayed true to reality, keeping the events mostly accurate to what Eichenwald described in his book, and hence, to what really happened; in fact, on a side note, after seeing the movie, the real-life Mark Whitacre commented that the film was "very accurate", which is a bit of a surprise considering Soderbergh made the decision to not consult any of the people involved in the actual 1990s investigation.

Oddly enough, while this probably sounds contradictory to the opening statement of my review, much of the humor actually springs out of the events and dialogue depicted in the book, almost all of which took place in reality, rather than jokes or quips written by the screenwriter or improvised by the director or actors. There are so many hidden layers to the tale that, in retrospect, it is hard to not laugh or at least gap in wonder at how it all unfolded. Of course, that is not to say that Scott Z. Burns, who adapted Einchenwald's book for the screen, did not do any work. The screenplay does an admirable job of adhering to the true events with enough creativity, wit and originality to prevent the film from seeming like just a retread of everything Einchenwald accomplished in his narrative.

Also impressive is the cast. Naturally, as Mark Whitacre, Matt Damon stands out. Even though he had not met the person he was portraying before filming, he perfectly captures Whitacre's personality, mannerisms and attitude, making him seem larger-than-life but at the same time, completely and utterly human, while many other actors might have made him too much of a caricature. The supporting cast does a fine job as well and perhaps the most noteworthy of these actors are Scott Bakula as the benignly professional FBI agent Brian Shepard and Melanie Lynskey, who portrays Whitacre's devoted wife, Ginger, with a sort of Mid-western bubbliness.

In typical Steven Soderbergh mode, the director adds a quirky, unique tone to the movie. Although the whimsical, almost cartoonish score is sometimes a bit intrusive, this quaint style effectively mirrors the film's su