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• 30 Minutes-Dahr Jamail: The Will To Resist 2 of 2
• Flicks - Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
• 30 Minutes-Dahr Jamail: The Will To Resist

Flicks - The Informant! The Informant! is an uncomfortable comedy, and that’s exactly what it wants to be. by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob Of all the directors in Hollywood, Steven Soderbergh is the hardest to figure out. On the one hand, he's capable of churning out mainstream fare like Erin Brockovich or the Ocean's Eleven movies, but then he turns around and creates movies like Che, the rigorous five-hour film about Che Guevara that I reviewed earlier this year. In his new film, The Informant!, Soderbergh gives us what would appear to be one of his Hollywood entertainments, but he twists the material into something completely unexpected.
Based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald about an actual case, The Informant! tells the story of Mark Whitacre, an executive for agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland who became an informant for an FBI investigation into company price-fixing in the 1990s. As played by Matt Damon, Whitacre is an earnest, seemingly naïve corporate climber who ends up involved with the FBI out of fear that he could become a fall guy for the company. But in voice-overs that reveal his thoughts on life throughout the film, Whitacre proves himself to be a very odd character indeed, his mind occupied with the most trivial and banal details of appearance and conduct, an enigma as much to himself as to others.
The story as it unfolds is complicated, and in another director's hands it would be played for drama and suspense, but Soderbergh has a very dry, satiric attitude towards the corporate culture he's portraying. Overlaid with a goofy 60s-style Marvin Hamlisch musical score that parodies everything from situation comedies to James Bond, the film takes an oppositional approach not only to Whitacre, but to all the people around him: the ADM executives, the two FBI agents wonderfully played by Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, and the lawyers and media types who get sucked into the scandal. Even the title The Informant! is a bit of mockery, with its exclamation point.
What everyone gradually discovers is that Whitacre is a wack-job and a compulsive liar, which complicates the case immeasurably. Damon does an astounding job playing a complete fool with a straight face, especially effective since Soderbergh keeps the audience on its toes by never indulging in pure farce. The idea, as I see it, is to implicate us in the character. Instead of the conspiratorial view of the bad guys versus the heroic informant, the kind of thing we saw in the movie The Insider, for instance, here we have stupidity, recklessness and lack of accountability as the main ingredients of corporate disaster, and we're meant to make the connection with the more recent Wall Street collapse.
The screenplay by Scott Z. Burns is wickedly deadpan in its observations, and in its determination not to let anyone feel smug or self-satisfied, including the viewer. The result is a movie that deliberately subverts its own genre. Soderbergh has the courage to be very provocative, even aggressive in his satire, a rarity in any film, let alone a Hollywood film. The Informant! is an uncomfortable comedy, and that's exactly what it wants to be.