Larry Clow

From the exclamation point appended to the title to the standoffish based-on-a-true-story title card at the film’s start (it ends with “So there.”), “The Informant!” all but challenges you to believe it. Director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film is, after all, based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, a former high-ranking executive at agri-business giant Archer Daniels Midland who, in the early 1990s, blew the whistle on the company’s price-fixing scheme. That much is true, despite the sort of “nyah-nyah” declaration at the outset.

But the line between fact and fiction quickly becomes unrecognizable. “The Informant!” at first appears to be part white-collar crime drama, part character study, in the vein of Michael Mann’s “The Insider.” But as the film unfolds and Whitacre shifts from the executive who cried wolf to whistleblower par excellence and finally into something else entirely, “The Informant!” seems more in line with “Burn After Reading,” the Coen Brothers’ black comedy from last fall about bumbling idiots caught up in the very deadly world of espionage. While “Burn” had the benefit of being fictional, “The Informant!” carries with it a grain or two of truth, and this makes the movie all the more engaging–and slightly frustrating.

Matt Damon stars as Whitacre, an up-and-coming division president at ADM. He’s got a wife, two adopted children and a six-figure salary. After concocting a story about some corporate espionage by a one of ADM’s Japanese rivals (in order to stall on an important project), Whitacre decides to confess to an FBI agent how ADM and its competitors regularly meet to fix prices on their products. Whitacre positions himself as a white knight going up against a sinister corporate behemoth and soon is gleefully wearing a wire, setting up secret meetings and snitching regularly to his FBI handlers (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale). Whitacre isn’t the altruist he appears to be, though his façade fools everyone, from his doting, gullible wife (Melanie Lynskey) to a series of federal investigators. As the feds wrap up their investigation of ADM, they discover their white knight’s armor is gray, verging on black, and Whitacre reveals the cries of a whistleblower may, in fact, be a distraction.

Obscured by some additional girth, big glasses, an ill-advised mustache and what looks to be a bad toupee, Damon literally disappears into the role. He wanders around with his mouth agape, marveling at the hidden cameras and secret microphones the FBI has set up at his behest. Whitacre narrates the film, sharing inane observations and remarking about on-screen events, and it’s hard to tell whether Whitacre’s outward naïvete is camouflage for his inner cunning or if he really is just a big dork who’s out of his element. One of Whitacre’s observations concerns two kinds of butterfly—one carries a deadly poison in its wings, while the other, which looks exactly like its poisonous brethren, is entirely harmless. That’s Whitacre in a nutshell—a nebbish who runs with the big boys only by virtue of appearing to be dangerous.

Looks can be deceiving, especially to one’s self, and Damon nails Whitacre’s transformation from a desperate man who lies in order to save himself into a commensurate liar who spins elaborate yarns just for the sake of watching himself work. As Whitacre, Damon has an affable, goofy charm that is, ultimately, vexing. By the end of the film, he’s lied to everyone, including the audience, but you can’t hold it against him.

It’s a good thing, too, because Damon’s performance carries “The Informant!” As Whitacre secretly tapes business meetings and smuggles out sensitive documents, he constantly references early-‘90s legal thrillers like “The Firm” and “Rising Sun.” Fortunately for Whitacre, there’s not even a hint of such danger in “The Informant!” That juxtaposition creates a touch of dramatic tension, but it’s not enough to keep the second half of the film from feeling directionless. The rest of the cast is good, particularly Lynskey, who, in the few scenes she’s in, subtly hints she may be just as sneaky as her husband. But for the most part, the other characters exist only to alternatively congratulate, chide and grow exasperated with Whitacre.

It’s hard to see how the movie could play out any other way, though. Corporate crime and multi-million-dollar fraud is serious business, but Soderbergh has the good sense to keep things light. A more serious touch might have left the movie feeling ponderous and uninteresting. “The Informant!” largely takes place in non-descript hotel rooms and bland offices and the soundtrack calls to mind kitschy elevator music. Whitacre’s non-sequiturs and slapstick attempts at undercover work (he tries surreptitiously to fix a malfunctioning hidden tape recorder during a crucial meeting) are almost a parody of the smooth operators found in Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” flicks. The sugary coating and knowing laughs in “The Informant!” take the sting out of the fact that real big-time crooks, like Whitacre and his bosses at ADM, rarely get caught and almost always exploit the court system to their advantage. After the near-catastrophic economic collapse of last fall, it’s a story that’s all too familiar and easy to believe.