The Informant! is director Steven Soderbergh’s most
entertaining and effective feature since 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven.
At the turn of the past decade, in a four-year stretch that produced
Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich,
Traffic, and finally Ocean’s Eleven, Soderbergh emerged
as perhaps the medium’s most artful hit-maker. Then
— Ocean’s sequels aside — he mostly withdrew,
embracing digital video and experimentation in a series of lesser-seen
art films such as Bubble, the two-part Che, and The
Girlfriend Experience.

In this context, The Informant! comes across as a successful
union of these two periods in Soderbergh’s filmography: It’s an
entertaining star-driven vehicle with frequent collaborator Matt Damon
in the lead but also an odd, modest film shot on cheap-looking digital
video.

The look of the film bothered me in the trailer. It is a visual
medium after all, so movies should look as good as the creators have
the ability and means to make them. And there’s no limitation on cost
and talent when it comes to a Soderbergh/Damon vehicle. But in context,
the shabby photographic texture matches the intentionally shabby
production design of a film set largely in mid-size Midwestern towns in
the ’90s, in ugly offices with boxy computers, in anonymous hotel
rooms.

Based on a true story told in writer Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 book of
the same title, The Informant! is about corporate whistleblower
Mark Whitacre (Damon), a trained biochemist who moved over to the
business side and worked his way up the executive ladder at Archer
Daniels Midland, the agribusiness giant where “corn goes in one end and
profit comes out the other.”

Early in the film, Whitacre tells his employers of a corporate
espionage plot and extortion attempt he’s uncovered. The bosses bring
in the FBI to investigate, and Whitacre corners one of them to reveal
an illegal price-fixing scheme involving the company and some of their
international competitors, turning an anxious but eager Whitacre into a
government informant secretly taping meetings.

Damon reportedly gained 30 pounds for the role, and his paunch, big
glasses, bushy mustache, heavy toupee, and print ties make him
something of a poster boy for Midwestern lame.

In a lesser film — say, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska-set
About Schmidt — middle American grotesquerie could be
the subject itself. But The Informant! works through this,
getting the audience on Whitacre’s side, rooting for him.

Smartly, Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns concoct a
voiceover narration for Whitacre, a rat-a-tat-tat stream of
consciousness where we hear how he thinks: flossing in the shower can
add up to significant time savings and how the metric system never
caught on except for the liter bottle because “it’s a nicer name than a
quart.”

Whitacre may look like a doofus, but he’s a smart, thoughtful guy
even though his musings stray into weird territory (whose don’t?). Or,
so we think. As the plot unspools, what we think we know about Whitacre
and his situation begins to unravel. Things go all screwy in funny,
compelling ways, and it becomes clear that the target of the comedy
here is as much the audience as it is Whitacre.

Soderbergh lets Archer Daniels Midland (which did pay a $100 million
price-fixing fine and send three executives to prison) off the hook a
bit. The ramifications of corporate malfeasance are hugely important,
but that’s not what this movie’s about: It’s a sly, brainy, convoluted
lark. As a star-driven comic thriller, it’s essentially an inverted,
shaggy-dog answer to Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich. As a story
about corporate whistleblowing, it’s The Insider played as
squirrelly comedy. Soderbergh tips his hand in the casting, with
ostensibly straight supporting roles played by professional comedians
from such sources as 30 Rock, Arrested Development, and
The Soup. One Smothers brother is a judge, another plays a
corporate heavyweight, last seen laughing in character but also
seemingly with and partly at the audience.