Out of Frame: The Informant!
Most people would probably look at the story of Mark Whitacre, the Archer Daniels Midland executive who donned a wire for the FBI in the early '90s and became the most famous (and highest ranking) corporate whistleblower in history, and see it as a tragedy. Between what it has to say about willful corporate corruption as well as about the ravages of mental illness, a film treatment of Whitacre's story could have easily been a dark and sobering look into international conspiracy and one man's precipitous downfall. But Director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns looked at the story, as told in Kurt Eichenwald's bestselling book, and decided it was a laugh-out-loud comedy. Though they did keep the "dark" intact.
From the very first title card, Soderbergh announces The Informant! as a cheeky venture, segueing from there to an opening credit sequence featuring languorous tracking shots of surveillance equipment, accompanied by a Marvin Hamlisch score that recalls the cheesiest film soundtracks of the 1970s and early '80s. Mere seconds into the film, without a single line of dialog spoken or any actual action onscreen, and already Soderbergh scores a belly-laugh with this musical joke.
By the time Matt Damon first appears onscreen, he doesn't have to say anything to elicit a laugh, decked out in the most tragic, colorful ties and ill-fitting suits 1991 had to offer, an unfortunate '80s-holdover porn-star mustache, 30 extra pounds of paunch, and a fluffy, feathered hairpiece that might upstage the actor on its own if he weren't so utterly brilliant in the role.
And brilliant he is. Damon returns after a two-year hiatus from lead roles to deliver the finest performance of his career. The comedy here isn't broad, and the laughs come from situations and character rather than jokes. Damon is required to be funny while playing it straight, while Soderbergh and Burns do the more ostentatious work behind the scenes. The truly fascinating choice made by the director is to surround Damon with comic actors who aren't doing anything funny at all. There is a comedic tension created in every scene that features funnymen like Patton Oswalt, Joel McHale, or Tony Hale, as we expect them to go for the comedy jugular. But they never really do, a move that subverts expectations in inventive ways.
Everything about The Informant! seems designed to put audiences off balance. It's a period film set in the first half of the 1990s, yet shot in a style and soundtracked with schmaltzy music both meant to evoke films 10-20 years before that period. It's a thriller based on a story to which many people already know the ending. It casts an actor known for one of the most successful spy movie franchises in history as an utterly graceless espionage agent, a move akin to casting Sean Connery as Austin Powers. It takes a situation grounded in reality and projects onto it a surreal light.
How this mess of contradictions can possibly be successful has to be attributed to the man at the helm. Soderbergh channels the inspired lunacy of his early absurdist comedy Schizopolis through the skillful populist storytelling of Ocean's Eleven. The result is just as entertaining as Ocean's, without ever sacrificing its whip-smart sensibilities.
Soderbergh does fall a little too in love with just how well he's made the film: it runs about twenty minutes too long, out of the necessity of unraveling the complex cat's cradle of deceit that the film treats as specious gospel before the frayed ends start to show. But too much of a good thing is faint criticism, especially when the good thing is as much fun as The Informant!
Now playing at the Uptown, Georgetown, and a few theaters outside of town.