Steven Soderbergh’s new film “The Informant!” is a bizarre, perplexing mess. This is not entirely a bad thing. The bizarre, perplexing nature of the true-life story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), who blew the whistle on his employer to stop a price-fixing conspiracy but ended up destroying his own life in the process, almost seems to necessitate such a film. Whitacre’s story is filled with weird, contradictory choices, and Soderbergh’s audacious gambit is to make contradiction the guiding spirit of the film.
The tone of the film is the most obvious example. “The Informant!” seems to constantly flit between ridiculous farce and solemn tragedy. Our subject is nominally how the case of one of the largest corporate crimes in American history was cracked, but the movie is fundamentally uninterested in the crime itself, keying in instead on Whitacre’s cracked mind. Damon’s running voiceover throughout the film generally drowns out details like the actual ramifications of the crimes in favor of loony ramblings about how polar bears can tell their noses are black or why the Japanese would sell used schoolgirl panties in vending machines. It is very funny stuff, even if the jokes are tinged with a bitter taste by the seriousness tthat surrounds them.
The film settles into a mostly comic vibe as Whitacre ineptly starts to spy for the FBI on his own company — he calls himself Agent 0014 because he’s twice as smart as 007 — but the film starts to veer back toward tragedy as the surprising extent of Whitacre’s duplicity becomes clear. (I would urge to you to find out as little as possible about Whitacre before seeing the film — the revelations about his character are perhaps the greatest joys of this film.)
The technical elements of the film complement the jumping around nicely. On one hand, veteran comedy score composer Marvin Hamlisch soundtracks the film with an abundance of whistles, kazoos and tubas. On the other hand, Soderbergh, who always acts as his own cinematographer under a pseudonym, slathers the screen with oppressive, tense orange tones that could have been pulled from his revenge thriller “The Limey.”
The film’s casting fits right in with the overall incomprehensibility. Having Matt Damon put on 40 pounds, a gaudy hairpiece and an ugly mustache to play the whistleblower Whitacre doesn’t seem all that odd — in fact, it seems right out of the how-to-get-an-Oscar-nomination playbook. What is odd is that the straight men to Damon’s comic character are all played by comedians. Joel McHale of “The Soup” plays one of Whitacre’s FBI contacts, Tony Hale of “Arrested Development” is Whitacre’s lawyer, and a whole array of other comedians make surprising cameos. I suppose there’s some meta-point being made here about the absurdity of bureaucracy, but Soderbergh mutes it by directing these comedians to play the material as straight as possible — the laugh lines pretty much all come from Damon’s mugging.
What exactly does all of this mess leave us with? Well, it’s something worth seeing, I suppose. Whitacre claimed to be bipolar, and though nothing he ever said could really be trusted, his behavior certainly seems to support his claim. Soderbergh has therefore made a film modeled after Whitacre’s damaged psyche, spinning in all directions and never really finding a center.
It’s an interesting achievement, though it’s inherently unsatisfying in a lot of ways. Jumping between comedy and tragedy keeps the movie from reaching the peaks either side can provide. It’s hard to feel any force in Whitacre’s plight when we’ve been laughing at his foolish behavior for the whole film, and the stabs at tragedy inevitably drag the free-wheeling comedy bits down a bit.
But there’s a lot of fun to be had here. The laughs are plentiful, and Damon rises beautifully to the strange challenge set for him. He pulls off the comedy quite well, but more important is his modulation of his movie-star charm. Like that rambling voiceover, Damon’s natural likability is a defensive feint that hides the more unsavory aspects of his character, and it’s fascinating to see how Damon pulls back on that charm over the course of the film, giving us a Whitacre in the final scene that’s an emotionally naked shell of his former self. It’s a great performance, and I have to grudgingly admit that it may even merit an Oscar nomination. It is also just fun to revel in the weird world that Soderbergh has created and to see how all these incongruous elements mesh into an unlikely whole.
Soderbergh’s body of work is something you have to at least admire because the man consistently takes honest-to-god, big, hairy chances — the sort of chances that would torpedo the careers of other directors. Certainly, he can fall flat on his face, particular when he gets hung up on a technical challenge — “The Good German” meticulously recreated 1940s filmmaking techniques down to using the same cameras but failed in prosaic elements like plot and character. But he has also provided us with landmark achievements like “Che,” the innovative, digitally-lensed four-hour biopic of the Cuban revolutionary.
“The Informant!” falls somewhere between those two poles, but whatever else the film may be, it is the bold product of a singular vision, and, with the multiplexes ruled by cookie-cutter copies, that should be appreciated.
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