Nicholas Thurkettle

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.
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