The Informant! (2009)

Prolific director Steven Soderbergh has never been one to shy away from experimentation and quirkiness. He’s made popular “mainstream” films like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Ocean’s 11/12/13 series, but he’s also made a black-and-white expressionist film about Franz Kafka and a four-hour biopic of Che Guevara. His latest film (his third released this year!) is The Informant! — a mainstream-targeted entertainment with unusually quirky qualities that make it really weird, yet amusingly funny and slyly seductive.

Like a strange, gender-reversed Erin Brockovich, The Informant! dramatizes a true story of an ordinary person who detects corruption in big business and works to bring the corporate criminals to justice. In this case, it’s a mustachioed and toupeed Matt Damon playing Mark Whitacre, a bioengineer who was promoted into the upper management of food processing conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) at their headquarters in Decatur, Illinois.

In the early 1990s, Whitacre tells his superiors he suspects one of their Japanese competitors of corporate sabotage and attempted extortion. The FBI shows up to investigate, led by Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula, looking very dweeby in his own bad toupee and his short-sleeved shirts). When Shepard comes to Whitacre’s house to put a tap on his corporate phone line, Whitacre tells him there’s more to the story than meets the eye: his bosses at ADM are in cahoots with the Japanese to fix the price of lysine, one of their most popular food chemical products at the time. Shepard smells a potentially big criminal scandal, and enlists Whitacre as his informant.

Whitacre takes to this espionage with enthusiasm, but also with no small amount of ineptitude; the tape recorder hidden in his briefcase starts making noise during a corporate meeting, he waves at a hidden camera, and he talks way too much to too many people. His thoughts are presented to us in frequent stream of consciousness voice-over narration, which is where a major element of the humor resides — his brain goes a mile a minute pinging from one random thought to the next as he considers himself “Agent double-0 14, because I’m twice as smart as 007.” Whitacre leads the FBI around the world for several years while he attends price-fixing meetings and supposedly gathers more evidence. Eventually the men in suits all around him start to wonder: Is Whitacre truly a whistleblower crusading for justice? Is he competent enough to provide actionable evidence? Or is he just a bullshit artist, and a rather artless one at that?

The exclamation point in the film title (which wasn’t in the original book title) gives a hint of the comical shadings on this true story. It’s not necessarily the sort of comedy that delivers big sight gags and punchlines; it’s much more subtle than that because it’s based on reality. I started watching this movie smiling, the early scenes had me chuckle a few times, but the laughter built up as the film progressed. The deceptively smart script makes a believable and clever tale out of what could otherwise be a very dry and cinematically boring probe of corporate greed and corruption.

The supporting cast is great, including Melanie Lynskey (Kate Winslet’s partner in crime from Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures) as Whitacre’s steadfast wife, Tony Hale (Buster Bluth on Arrested Development) as Whitacre’s lawyer, the always awesome Clancy Brown (the brutal guard in The Shawshank Redemption) as the corporation lawyer, and appearances by both of the Smothers Brothers in separate and serious roles. But it’s Matt Damon who clearly reigns supreme here, with one of his best performances ever. He’s funny and always overthinking just as his character does, and he deserves recognition for this role when awards season comes around.

And I’ve saved the weirdest, wackiest elements of this film for last. Steven Soderbergh presents this film in a peculiar style that evokes the cinema of the 1970s: the opening credits look like the beginning of Klute and many other films of the period, with puffy lettering in a vintage-looking font in day-glo colors, which amusingly reappear throughout the film. And the movie features a wildly overblown score — so outlandish it generates laughs on its own — by none other than the famous ’70s-era film composer Marvin Hamlisch! There’s even a song over the closing credits by Hamlisch with lyrics by his long-time collaborators Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

It’s a strange notion to apply 1970’s style to a movie set in the ’90s and made in 2009, but for the most part it seems to work. Soderbergh, Damon, and producer George Clooney like to take chances and do things a little differently, and with The Informant! they’ve succeeded in crafting an odd-yet-strangely-endearing little comedy that will entertain people who, like Mark Whitacre, think too much.