Nicholas Thurkettle

Originally posted 12/15/04

Ocean’s Twelve
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: George Nolfi, based on characters created by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell
Producer: Jerry Weintraub
Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Vincent Cassel, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, Elliot Gould, Carl Reiner, Shaobo Qin, Eddie Jemison

There is the heist movie where we root for our heroes to pull it off, then there is the one where we realize with dread that they won’t get away with it. Ocean’s Eleven, the 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle about knocking over a Vegas casino, was the former, as is this sequel. Watching with faith that our heroes will somehow come out on top, our enjoyment lies in the discovery of details – details about how impossible the job is, and the details of how they overcome those impossibilities.

The details in the first effort from Clooney and the gang were impeccable – every member of the “Eleven” had a clear task to attend to, and the heist they pulled off was paced well and enjoyably ridiculous while keeping that single all-important stretching toe on the line of plausibility. Like good soul music, you could enjoy the style because the groove was locked in tight. But in Ocean’s Twelve, after going through the motions of reassembling the entire crew, the story labors heavily to keep track of them all, and eventually resorts to just throwing increasing numbers of them in jail to lessen confusion.

If it feels as if they’ve been grafted onto a story that cannot hold their weight, it’s because this is exactly what happened – George Nolfi’s script, originally titled Honor Among Thieves, was set up for John Woo to direct. These characters were dropped in after the financial failure of director Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris and Clooney’s directing debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (both underrated and worth a look) made this sequel what an agent would call “smart business”. At least they decided to have some fun in fulfilling this obligation, but unfortunately not all of that fun is passed along to the audience.
(continue reading…)

The Informant!
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, based on the book by Kurt Eichenwald
Producers: Michael Jaffe, Howard Braunstein, Kurt Eichenwald, Jennifer Fox, Gregory Jacobs
Stars: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Tom Papa, Rick Overton, Ann Cusack

When Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) describes FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) as “a good listener”; it is all but a declaration of love at first sight. Whitacre himself is not much of a listener, at least to others – his brain is racing full-time with shifting thoughts, trivial musings, and self-aggrandizement. He is speaking with Agent Shepard in order to become a corporate whistleblower, and will spend three years undercover at his own company, collecting evidence of a billion-dollar fraud. The Agent and his partner (Joel McHale) marvel at Whitacre’s ability to live two lives.

What they fail to understand it that this is not a torture to him, but a dream come true. The Informant! – based on the gripping book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald – is about a man who stopped living just one life a long time ago. In the life most people see he is a dweebish but highly-capable biochemist rising through the corporate ranks of ADM, one of the world’s largest food-products manufacturers. They can do things with an ear of corn that would startle you. But Whitacre has other lives – more fantastical, grandiose ones – as an orphan who made good out of some Dickensian turns of fortune, or as a guy with a swell idea for a TV show; and now, thanks to Agent Shepard, he gets to be the chipper, downstate version of Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Eichenwald’s book about the real-life price-fixing case built on the foundation of Whitacre’s testimony and wire recordings is an addictive read, because just as the intrigue about the case settles into procedure, the secret intrigue around Whitacre begins to unfurl itself. It earns its page-turning power because of how unbelievable is each successive act and revelation, how it makes you realize how little you can really know someone.

What filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has done is to seize on that essential truth, and bring all his prodigious tools to work mining it. The Informant! is not a follower on the path of Michael Mann’s The Insider, which another filmmaker might have made, but rather is an awesome cinematic joke, a pie in the face of America’s self-deluding hero complex, resting on a performance by Matt Damon free from all physical or psychological vanity.
(continue reading…)