On the surface, if it had been made 30 years ago, Mark Whitacre, the Matt Damon character in Steven Soderbergh’s newest film The Informant, would have been played by Peter Sellers in the same vein as his lovably goofy and bumbling characters from such timeless comedies as The Pink Panther or The Party.
Just like a Seller’s classic, Whitacre, stumbles his way into a corporate whistle-blowing scheme in which he informs to the FBI that his high powered company Archer Daniel Midland is in the business of meeting with competitors in the Lysine market to fix the prices.
Whitacre, a top ranking employee with what would appear to be a guilty conscious, thus begins helping the FBI gather hours of tapes and recordings of top ADM execs in incriminating meetings.
Unlike Insp. Jacques Clouseau though there is more to the story than meets the eye: Whitacre is not simply so morbidly incompetent that he trips on top of success in the end. The real life Whitacre spent seven years in jail for being caught skimming some odd nine million dollars out of the company while the investigation was going on, but that this very man managed to even get that far is still a small kind of success unto itself.
Soderberg's Comic Tone
It’s just right then that Soderbergh approaches this story with a deftly off-centre comic tone because a) the story, based somewhat on a true one, is so obscenely outlandish that comedy is a natural fit, but b) it’s important the audience like this mook Whitacre because, unlike a Seller’s character, there are other, far more complex circumstances lurking below the surface and hearts therefore go out to him in the end when the true motives behind his actions slowly begin to reveal themselves. Whitacre is not even close to being a bad guy and because of that his story slowly reveals itself as somewhat of a tragedy.
Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre
The main crux of the film then is a bloated, toupeed, mustached Matt Damon who does a masterful job of making Whitacre something you’d expect to find in a classic screwball comedy, living in his plush house, loving his perky wife and their kids, being an important, high salaried part of his company, etc. but also portraying a darker, more seething energy that lurks just below the surface.
It's something that he expresses in his constant internal monologues, which are hilarious at first and then reveal themselves as kind of painful. It’s an essence that neither the audience nor Whitacre quite understand. By the film’s close, the viewers are more educated on this man’s affliction but he remains just as oblivious the day he walks out of jail as the day he walked in. That’s his personal tragedy.
If Oscar doesn’t come knocking at Damon’s door come February, there will be five very remarkable performances to look forward to still in 2009.
Soderbergh: A Master Film Technician
Soderbergh, who directed, but also shot and edited under his regular pseudonyms, is a nearly flawless film technician and does a masterful job of balancing not just the duality of the story, but of Whitacre’s own personal pain as well.
Because this is not a narrative film, but a mood piece, focusing not on plot points, but methods of behavior, both internal and external, Soderbergh is subtle in his technique. See the way he shoots Whitacre head on, editing on 180 degree angles, to make it appear as though he is speaking directly to the audience, forcing them to deal with this man instead of laughing him off as the sad sack punching bag in some shallow comedy. Or, how one single edit that takes place during one specific line of dialogue, during the midpoint, can act as the center for the entire film; shifting its axis from the comedic to the sometimes uncomfortable. Soderbergh is a film stylist in the truest sense of the term.
The Best Kind of Films
Finally The Informant is a testament to the fact that the best films, the ones that truly reach out, grab hold and suck audiences into their world are not the overpriced, over-produced blockbuster spectacles, but that ones that revolves around good stories and strong characters with great actors playing them.
Those are the kinds of films people still want to see and that’s the kind of film The Informant is. It’s not really a film about corporate swindles or cover-ups or corruption or theft as a plot description would suggest, but a funny, affecting, engaging human study about the character contradictions of a silly and likable man who is trapped inside himself without ever really knowing.
The Informant is then finally two films at once. That Mark Whitacre tells a friend that his FBI code name is 0014 because he is twice as smart as James Bond is funny. That it might be the truth is, in a way, kind of heartbreaking.
