Collusion case in Decatur inspires subtle character comedy
About halfway through Steven Soderbergh's fact-based comedy "The Informant!," I couldn't help but think, "Why, this is exactly the kind of movie that someone some day might make about one of Illinois' more colorful politicians!"
"The Informant!" (yes, that exclamation point is intentional) tells the true story, more or less, of a federal investigation prompted by the irrational acts of an intelligent man whose warped, delusional view of his own goodness and self-importance becomes so convincing that everyone around him gets sucked into one, gigantic media storm of outrageous deception, greed, corruption and political megalomania.
It was a brush of utter brilliance for Soderbergh to mount "The Informant" as a comedy, complete with a fun and punchy score from Marvin Hamlisch, paying tribute to Henry Mancini's music during his original "Pink Panther" period.
But "The Informant!" offers us no jokes or boisterous humorous payoffs. Rather, it depends on a subtle comic tone and Matt Damon's dweeby performance to work, although neither one can fully sustain Soderbergh's bold movie.
Damon, who's already worked with Soderbergh on five films (including the "Ocean's" trilogy) chunks up with an extra 30 pounds, gets a nasty hairstyle and brandishes the scraggliest mustache since Tom Hanks' lip hair in "Road to Perdition."
Damon plays nerdy Mark Whitacre, a biochemist for the downstate Decatur agribusiness company Archer Daniels Midland where he handles the lucrative area of additives.
The story begins as a conventional whistle-blower drama (think of a whimsical version of "The Insider"). Whitacre tells his bosses he's convinced a competitor has been sabotaging the company's additives, mostly lysine.
When Whitacre receives an extortion request for $10 million, FBI agents Shepard and Herndon (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) swoop in, never suspecting they're about to uncover the biggest international price-fixing scheme in corporate history.
"There are things going on here I don't approve of!" Whitacre says, so he agrees to wear an FBI wire to obtain evidence against his company.
Here is where "The Informant!" slowly transforms from a plot-driven formula into a series of escalating revelations, each one trumping its predecessor in scope, daring and utter disbelief.
Like a little boy in a legal toy store, Whitacre plows through armies of investigators and attorneys while Scott Z. Burns' screenplay (based on Kurt Eichenwald's book) skillfully employs surprises to nudge the narrative along.
In the movie's loopiest achievement, Burns gives Whitacre crazy interior monologues that sound irrelevant and random (his evaluation of the metric system, for example) but they actually clue us into his psyche as a self-delusional nut job who constantly references Michael Crichton novels and calls himself Agent 014 because "I'm twice as smart as Agent 007."
If you go to see "The Informant!" and expect a conventional comedy with big laughs and broad jokes, you will be disappointed.
This is not a sitcom or a farce, as we're used to watching, but a comedy based on character, one executed with subtle finesse by an unBourne Damon, projecting a perfect portrait of intelligence without the bother of reality checks.
"I'm the good guy in all this," Whitacre keeps saying.
Or was that one of our former governors?
<p class="factboxheadblack">"The Informant!"</p>< p class="News">Three stars</p> <p class="News"><b>Starring:</b> Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Bakula, Clancy Brown</p> <p class="News"><b>Directed by:</b> Steven Soderbergh</p> <p class="News"><b>Other: </b>A Warner Bros. release. Rated R for language. 108 minutes.</p>