Zipping nimbly between megastar blockbusters and experimental narratives, Steven Soderbergh has established himself as the most agile filmmaker in America. He pulls off another neat trick in The Informant! For the first time, the director of Ocean's Eleven and The Girlfriend Experience brings the two halves of his formidable brain together.
Structured as a whistleblower drama but styled as something much more playful, this is Soderbergh at his most engaging. In a story based on Kurt Eichenwald's non-fiction book, Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, an Ivy League Ph.D. holder now working as an executive at agricultural corporate giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Their unofficial motto: “Corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other.”
When the U.S. government begins to suspect ADM of price-fixing, it recruits Whitacre to spy on his own company. Fitted with an FBI wire, he sits in on meetings with ADM's Japanese competitors, gathering evidence to bring his employer down. But Whitacre is no Erin Brockovich. As he is squeezed by both the FBI's lead agent (Scott Bakula) and his own bosses at ADM, his motives become more and more suspect and his behaviour stranger and stranger.
Damon is a treat to watch here. Sporting a dodgy moustache and twenty extra pounds, he plays the increasingly shifty Whitacre with nothing short of glee. This is a man with boundless reserves of self-delusion, which become increasingly hilarious as he digs himself deeper into high-level intrigue. Soderbergh riffs off his character's unpredictable actions with techniques designed to remind us that we're watching a movie. The film is set in the nineties but adopts visual cues from the seventies, and the music by Marvin Hamlisch roams even more freely through Hollywood history.
Whistleblower movies can be enormously satisfying, feeding our fantasies of bringing down authority with the power of truth. Soderbergh offers such pleasure in The Informant!, together with a lively injection of wit.
Noah Cowan
Steven Soderbergh was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His feature films include
sex, lies and videotape (89),
Gray's Anatomy (96),
Schizopolis (96),
Out of Sight (98),
The Limey (99),
Erin Brockovich (00),
Traffic (00), which won four Academy Awards®, including best director,
Ocean's Eleven (01),
Full Frontal (02),
Solaris (02),
Ocean's Twelve (04),
Bubble (05),
The Good German (06),
Ocean's Thirteen (07),
Che (08),
The Girlfriend Experience (09) and
The Informant! (09).