The Informant! (**½)

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Thomas F. Wilson, Patton Oswalt
Seen: October 16th 2009

**½ Out of ****

The Informant! tells the unbelievable true story of how whistleblower Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) brought to its knees ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) in the early 90’s. ADM had a lot to do with corn and corn-related products, and during the early 90’s, the company was also involved in high-level price-fixing with Japanese companies in the Lysine industry. Whitacre confessed his involvement in the price-fixing schemes to FBI agent Brian Shepard (Bakula) one evening when Shepard and his partner Robert Herndon (McHale) come to install a wire-tap on his home phone in an investigation of a much smaller matter regarding ADM – obviously peeking the FBI’s interest. (Whitacre confessed this involvement of his purely because his wife called back Agent Shepard, and not (initially) of his own volition).

The movie is very interestingly presented as the narrative often takes a derailment into Whitacre’s thoughts while important issues are being discussed. It is utterly shocking to see the level of detachment Whitacre displays when things come to the boil, and the viewer will most probably, even if they know nothing of a corporate culture, think they can easily better Whitacre’s performance as a vice-president of a large company – since he makes such an absolute bang-up job out of it. It is simply astonishing to see this guy operate, constantly changing his story, inventing new stories and persisting with evident lies in the face of prosecution and sentencing to serious jail-time, and this only escalates during the telling of the story, which reaches from 1992 to around 1996.

The production is fantastic, no one will for even a minute suspect that this story does not transpire in the early 90’s. everything is in place, from the dreary office spaces, to the neutral colour schemes (both dress and decorative), to the terrible hairstyles and moustaches. Matt Damon disappears into his character, a complete antithesis of his portrayal of Jason Bourne, that you realise only on hindsight that this is not Mark Whitacre, but Matt Damon. It is interesting to see how far technology had come since then, and how much we were constrained by it back then.

The movie does unfortunately get boring after a while. This is because the way things are presented never changes, it starts out as an interesting way to present things and show us how crazy this man and his ideas was, but it never elevates or transforms to anything else from there, it simply stays the same, with preposterous lie after preposterous lie being uncovered/unveiled. The Informant! is a very interesting, funny and amusing movie, and it is also very well made, but only a select few will truly enjoy it for its entire running time, the majority will feel the boredom setting in soon enough.