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I once had a film professor who told me his favorite films were ones that started slow and then got really slow. I believe he is in the minority. Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” follows the first half of my professor’s criteria, which is why a lot of people are going to find it difficult to access. Soderbergh — most recently known for the “Ocean’s” movies and “Che” — rarely makes a film that isn’t entertaining. While he lets the narrative unwind slowly at first like a tangled ball of yarn, he picks up the pace exponentially as it races to the conclusion.
Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, the corporate whistle-blower who exposed price fixing in the late 1990s at his corporation ADM. Damon may be one of the most underappreciated actors working today. Despite being named the “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2007, he still has only one Academy Award nomination since he broke into stardom with Good Will Hunting more than a decade ago. Looking back, Damon could have earned gold for a number of projects — “The Departed,” “Syriana,” “The Good Shephard” and “The Bourne Ultimatum,” to name a few.
In “The Informant!,” Damon gives the kind of seamless performance that rides the line between being straight or over-the-top. It’s the kind of acting that Brad Pitt should have gotten more credit for last year in “Burn After Reading,” but Damon ups the ante, taking on one of the most complex characters I’ve seen on screen in years. The film follows Whitacre in his decision to turn on his own company, cooperating with an FBI investigation which begins looking for a corporate mole but winds up chasing more than a few geese.
The film works because Soderbergh strips Whitacre down to his bare essentials — both metaphorically and literally. He gives us complete access to Whitacre via Damon’s voiceover, which he uses to ruminate on everything from polar bears and butterflies to Asian businessmen buying panties. It’s a jumbled mess of stream-of-consciousness that gives us a slanted roadmap to Whitacre’s crooked mind.
Still, we don’t really feel like we know Whitacre. It’s not for lack of trying, but because the man’s layers, peeled off one by one throughout the film, seem endless. From top to bottom, this is one of the better films I’ve seen this year and worth going to see at least once if you can grant some patience during the first act.
Grade: B+
