The Informant!
Imagine, if you will, the scene: I am sitting there in the dark theater and I see the world ending in a flaming fireball as the trailer for 2012 plays out on screen. Next, the world ends in a blizzardy, desperate, eternal night in the trailer for The Road. Then Michael Moore begins knocking on the glass doors of AIG, asking for the American people's money back in Capitalism: A Love Story. And here I came to see Steven Soderbergh's new film, The Informant!, about price-fixing scandal accusations at the agri-business and corn products giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) who might possibly be “robbing Americans of millions, all before they finish breakfast.”
The Informant! set in the early 1990s in Decatur, Illinois, stars a somewhat pudgy Matt Damon as the mustached, toupeed and coifed Mark Whitacre, president of the bioproducts division at ADM, lover of colorful abstract ties, family man, and, ultimately, undercover FBI informant. Billed as a “suspense-thriller,” The Informant! has all the right ingredients, a la a John Grisham novel (to which Whitacre makes more than one reference), but none of the heightened anticipation of a true corporate thriller. There is evidently a high level of risk involved when playing God with other agri-business giants, the global economy and a vital foodstuff like corn syrup (which is in pretty much everything we eat), but maybe it's just too hard to make corn syrup prices exciting.
So, instead of suspicious briefcases or tense chases down dark alleyways, The Informant! puts the corporate crumbling in the background and focuses on the mystery of Mark Whitacre himself. What are his motives for bringing down ADM, and himself in the process? A Ph.D. with a plethora of degrees, is he a duplicitous genius or just a naïve whistleblower?
Current books and works about the real Mark Whitacre and the ADM scandal are split on discussing him as a hero or a villain, but, thankfully Soderbergh's The Informant! doesn't attempt to take its own stance. More an off-kilter comedy than melodrama, although somewhat lethargic for a “suspense-thriller,” The Informant!'s saving grace is that an apparently upfront and simple plot becomes all the more convoluted and cloudy as the film progresses, and Soderbergh isn't interested in tying up neat little answers. Damon, unsurprisingly, plays a great Whitacre, and his haphazard internal monologues add comedy and dimension to an otherwise dry world of business suits and corporate underhanded dealings.
Sarah Campbell is a Kenwood Press editor and staff writer. She is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University with a B.A. in screen writing.
Email: sarah@kenwoodpress.com
