Anything but the truth in Soderbergh’s newest film
Matt Damon has an identity problem.
In The Talented Mr. Ripley, his naïve sycophant Tom Ripley turns into a remorseless murderer. In the Bourne trilogy, his former assassin Jason Bourne struggles with his disjointed past. In The Departed, his charismatic police officer Colin Sullivan acts as a double agent for an Irish mob boss.
Loose lips · Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!. The film is based on the true story of Archer Daniels Midland’s international price-fixing fraud that occurred during the ’90s. - Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
For yet another award-winning director, Damon plays that seemingly good guy with a secret — a technique he has apparently mastered throughout his career. While his past troubled, dishonest and terribly crafty characters were undeniably intriguing, Damon has latched onto the best liar out of all of them.
That liar would be Mark Whitacre, the former division president of Archer Daniels Midland, an agricultural corporation that found itself bathed in global spotlight in the mid-’90s for an international price-fixing conspiracy.
The man who acted as an informant for the FBI and blew the whistle on ADM’s corporate misbehavior? Whitacre. The man who embezzled $9 million from the company? Also Whitacre.
This living, breathing, walking paradox is the subject of Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s latest based-on-actual-events film, The Informant!
Adapted from the nonfiction book of the same name, The Informant! follows Whitacre through the ’90s as he becomes a national celebrity for his extensive role in exposing ADM’s fraud. A hardworking family man living in Illinois, Whitacre — who worked as a biochemist before turning into a businessman — is ordinary in appearance yet extraordinary in intelligence, a characteristic that soon becomes Whitacre’s tragic flaw.
Damon is one of those actors who continually goes above and beyond the limitations placed upon him with his God-given boyish features. Though he dons a round prosthetic nose, an ill-fitting mustache and a pudgy midsection, Damon’s performance transcends his external modifications as he captures the essence of the character through his most minute mannerisms and fast-talking speech, delivering exaggerrated lines like “I’m 0014, because I’m twice as smart as 007” with ease.
But as mesmerizing as Damon is on screen, the true hero of the film is Soderbergh.
Soderbergh has built his extensive career around films that focus on real-life figures, which vary from activists (Erin Brockovich) to revolutionaries (Che: Part One and Two). Despite being based on actual events, The Informant! is, ironically enough, a departure from the decorated filmmaker’s filmography.
In a risky move, Soderbergh chose not to meet with anyone involved in the conspiracy, Whitacre’s personal life or even Whitacre — an uncharacteristic decision for the director who invited the real Erin Brokovich to the set of his Oscar-winning film of the same name. But with a subject that constantly treads the line between fact and fiction, Soderbergh’s disregard for sticking to the truth ultimately feeds his vision, enabling him to take Whitacre and his story and run wildly with it. Free from eyewitness accounts and evidential constraints, Soderbergh is at the height of his creativity and, as a result, The Informant! becomes Soderbergh’s most stylized film of his career.
In yet another bold move, Soderbergh opted for comedy over drama with Scott Z. Burns’ script, taking an inherently serious situation and flipping it onto its side to expose the satire hidden within the corporate structure. The casting of well-known comedians — Joel McHale, Scott Adsit and Tony Hale — in supporting roles combined with the sunny jazz score by notorious film composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and the ’70s sitcom throwback tonally completes Soderbergh’s absurdist piece on corporate corruption.
The further Soderbergh pushes his satire, however, the less room he leaves for the emotional dissection of his characters, and the audience cannot help but feel cheated by Soderbergh’s purposefully shallow direction.
But possessing a lack of heart is key when it comes to comedy, a genre that garners the most laughs from a character’s mishaps. With Whitacre, all Soderbergh had to do was sit back and let his main character attempt to talk his way out of trouble, and the laughs are there.
Whitacre intrigues his audience not by the magnitude of his plans or his incredible skill, but by his inability to differentiate between his own little world and the actual state of reality which causes him to constantly lie to nearly everyone he sees. He is at once the film’s protagonist and antagonist, the good guy the audience is rooting for and the bad guy the audience is hoping will fail.
It’s both frustrating and heartbreaking to watch Whitacre entangle himself in his web of lies; it’s even more frustrating to watch Whitacre fail to arc as a character. But as Soderbergh left Whitacre’s suicide attempt on the cutting room floor, it is assumed that the director wanted his protagonist to flatline in order to further reaffirm the ultimate thesis behind his satire: Some people are simply unable to change.
It’s the sole, sad truth in Soderbergh’s shady masterpiece.