The Informant!

Electing to watch The Informant!, a corporate crime caper, one day after watching Syriana, a corporate crime thriller (plus international intrigue), was maybe not the best idea I’ve ever had. Neither film really knocked me down, but neither was really bad, either. Both are overly complicated - real life often is, don’tcha know - and both feature Matt Damon; but only The Informant! is a Matt Damon Movie. He plays an executive at Archer Daniels Midland who finds himself caught up in corporate corruption and FBI investigations; and by the end of the film, so many truths and lies have turned backward on themselves that you’re almost sure that the story had to be made up.

But it wasn’t. It actually happened, to Mark Whitacre, back in the 1990s. Steven Soderbergh has crafted a film based on a fictionalized version of events, and he’s mostly done a good job with it. He gets a terrific performance from Damon, who flings himself into the role of hapless corporate stooge with reckless abandon. He has an internal monologue that moves from one thing to another so quickly that you almost can’t keep track of it; and most of what he’s thinking to himself has nothing to do with what’s happening in the picture. Soderbergh uses this personality quirk both to play up the humor - it’s an exceptional bit of screenwriting - and to give the viewer a better sense of who this character is; and by the time we get around to the end, a lot of the events that take place in the picture, and which seem utterly implausible when they are happening, end up feeling reasonably believable when you filter them through the lens of Mark’s inner monologue. Damon probably gets a Golden Globe nomination for his work here - but only because the Globes nominate in the lead acting category for both comedies/musicals and dramas.

The problems with the film are not with the acting or the story, but rather with the techincal aspects. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that Steven Soderbergh was a director with an enormous amount of indie cred. I don’t know how this decision got made, nor who made it. I was not consulted. I don’t know if I would go as far as to call him a hack, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t call him a hack, either. The whole “indie” film thing may well have started with sex, lies, and videotape, but that cinematic capital has got a shelf life.

The first problem is the lighting. You can’t always blame the director for this one, even if the director should be telling the cinematographer how to light the scene and then signing off on it before they roll film; but here you do get to blame the director, because Soderbergh also shot the picture. I’m not a photography person, so I don’t know the technical way to explain this; but Soderbergh did not do a very good job of reducing or eliminating the glare coming from ambient light sources - particularly the sun shining in through windows. The hazy glare occasionally dominated the frame and was exceedingly distracting; and if that haze was supposed to be symbolic of anything, I don’t think it worked. If it was supposed to add anything to what we get of Mark’s mental state, it’s nowhere near as effective as the internal monologue.

Second problem is close-up shots. These are hazy too, which means that the haze probably comes in part from the film stock or maybe a setting on the shutter that altered the exposure (again, not a photography guy, so just guessing here); and they’re not especially contextual, either - often it’s just the head of the character, usually Matt Damon, without a lot of contrast to create any kind of an interesting composition. I would think, though, that those are going to be minor quibbles for most people, if they even notice them at all.

Some technical positives include the score by Marvin Hamlisch, which was kitschy and vaguely nostalgic - along with the colorful titles indicating place and time throughout the picture (the one indicating that the story has moved to Tokyo is drawn vertically, a nod to how Japanese is read), it evoked a sort of post-modern 1970s feel in a 1990s setting. The music was light and airy and almost had an old school video game feel to it - I half expected to hear “Soul Bossa Nova” by Quincy Jones come pouring out of the speakers at various points in the film; and it would not at all have surprised me to have seen a dance number at some point - one that would have fit here in an odd kind of way, the complete opposite of the one at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, which utterly failed. I was also surprised by how much I noticed the way that CRT computer monitors looked anachronistic. They’ve only just gone the way of the dodo in the last five or six years, but seeing them on all those desks gave me the feeling that the picture was set much longer ago than the early-mid 1990s.

This sounds way more negative than my actual impression of the film, and I think that’s mainly because this is a very good comic performance, by Matt Damon, that is situated inside of a film that just isn’t very interesting. I have a hard time making an emotional connection with lying corporate executives who have more money than they could ever spend and yet think they need to keep making more and more of it - at the expense of their customers. Like Jerry Maguire, this film says something ugly about our culture, without any of the anti-heroic romantic overtones of movies like The Godfather. And we’re just supposed to sit back and laugh at it? Give me Al Gore or Michael Moore any day, I think - at least they’re opening eyes and provoking debate by speaking the truth, however exaggerated it may be. This movie just passively makes light of what we the people have allowed this fading republic to become - an oblivious, anachronistic joke.