Movie Review: The Informant!

The Informant! is a bizarre Steven Soderbergh film staring Matt Damon as a real life whistleblower who took down ADM in the early 1990s.

Mark Whitacre was a senior executive at Archer Daniels Midland. He had a PhD in biochemistry and two law degrees and was the youngest Divisional President in the history of the company. In the early 90s he blamed a problem with lysine production on corporate espionage and the FBI was brought in. After a short while he confessed that ADM was involved in an international price-fixing scheme and spent several years helping them build the case including wearing a wire in meetings hundreds of times. But the story gets stranger than that and I won't go further.

Everyone seems to want to compare this to The Insider and the stories are similar but the films are almost opposites. The Insider is told a serious drama, The Informant! is an unusual dark comedy. The plot is almost incidental to various scenes of Mark going to and from meetings and acting a like a doofus. There's a running narration consisting of him babbling about non sequiturs like ties, polar bears, butterflies, the pronunciation of Porsche and morally questionable Japanese vending machines.

In spite of the fact the film is set in the early 1990s, everything about it screams the late sixties and early seventies. The font is out of Laugh In, the film looks like an episode of Dallas or Dynasty, the music is by Marvin Hamlisch. I assume it's all a metaphor for things not quite being what they seem to be, but it didn't work very well for me.

Maybe it would have pointless to make another movie like The Insider, but I think I would have enjoyed that film more than this one. I laughed out loud quite a few times, mostly at the peculiar voice over, but I was also restless at various times. The beginning goes on too long with him just being strange and there isn't enough time devoted to the plot. It seems like a really good story and Soderbergh just decided to make fun of something, though I'm not sure what; the subjects, the subject matter, or the audience.

PS. Soderbergh seems to like shots of a vehicle approaching and as it passes flipping the screen. He did it in Ocean's 12 with an airplane and I hated it. He does it here with a red Porsche and I hated it just as much. I don't know why.