There are several clues early on in The Informant! that this is not your typical tale of corporate intrigue. There’s that exclamation point at the end of the title, for instance, striking a note of Broadway-musical exuberance in a genre that usually thrives on somber performances and steel-grey cinematography. There’s the font that director Steven Soderbergh uses in the opening credits, the kind of mix of goofy, round uppercase and lowercase that hasn’t been seen since the days of Match Game. There’s the jaunty score by Marvin Hamlisch, one part swingin’ big band orchestra and two parts jokey instrumentals arranged for kazoo, banjo, and glockenspiel.And more than anything, there’s the voiceover, which represents the inner monologue of rising young Archer Daniels Midland executive Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), and which takes the concept of “unreliable narrator” to new heights of unmedicated eccentricity. When Whitacre, a biochemist by training who’s been promoted into the ADM executive suite, decides to inform to the FBI about his company’s participation in a scheme to fix the price of the food additive lysine, he fancies himself the crusading hero of his own real-life John Grisham novel, just like Tom Cruise in The Firm. But whenever we hear Whitacre’s thoughts, the dryer ball of earnest non sequiturs bouncing around inside his skull make him sound more like someone out of Joseph Heller — he’s just as likely to be nattering about why the nice ties are never on sale at the department store or savouring the German word for “pen” as he is thinking about the consequences of tattling to the government about his bosses’ misconduct. A peculiar man? You have no idea.
Not even the FBI agents assigned to be his handlers (two bone-dry performances by Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) can figure out exactly what Whitacre’s motivations might be. He’s making good money at ADM, he lives in a beautiful home with his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), and the company has treated him well. Why would he want to give all that up? At first, Whitacre seems merely like a deluded Boy Scout, so uncomfortable with dishonesty that calling the FBI feels like his only option. Later on, though, it appears that informing may be part of a deluded plan to climb the corporate ladder — yes, Whitacre actually seems to think that his bosses will reward him for sending his co-workers to jail. As he sees it, after they’re gone, he’ll be one of the most talented people left. (“I’m very valuable to the company!” he tells Ginger. “I speak four languages fluently!”) And suffice it to say there are even more layers to the Mark Whitacre onion, each one more incredible than the last.
With his bad haircut, off-the-rack suits, cookie-duster mustache, and doughy build, Mark Whitacre seems like an unlikely role for a movie idol like Matt Damon. But in fact it’s perfect casting — Damon has always excelled at playing characters whose antisocial, sometimes criminal, even sociopathic nature is almost perfectly concealed by their boyish, guileless looks, from the con artist in The Talented Mr. Ripley to the semi-addicted gambler in Rounders to the pickpocket in Ocean’s Eleven. Damon is such a likable performer — especially in the section of The Informant! where Whitacre bumbles his way through his FBI assignments — that you never once consider that Whitacre might not actually be this movie’s hero.
“Other filmmakers have long lists of dream projects they’d love to get made someday, maybe, if fortune smiles upon them,” Onion film critic Nathan Rabin recently wrote. “Steven Soderbergh gets a dream project made every couple of months.” It’s kind of crazy: this is the fourth Soderbergh film to come out this year, following his two-part Che biopic and The Girlfriend Experience, his low-budget satirical drama about a few days in the life of a status-conscious call girl. There’s still nearly fourth months left in 2009 too — for all I know, he has a slapstick comedy and an Agatha Christie-style whodunit still in the hopper.
The Informant! is swift, graceful, smart, witty, and unfussed-over in a way that feels quintessentially Soderberghian. (Yeah — the guy has earned his own adjective.) It’s a film by a director who comes up with more offbeat ideas than he knows what to do with: what if we got Marvin Hamlisch to write the music? What if we got comedians like Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, Allen Havey, Tony Hale, and the Smothers Brothers to play all the small “straight” roles? What if we tried out this kooky approach to the narration? You get the feeling that even Soderbergh isn’t sure how it’ll all come together onscreen, but that he’s eager to find out. More often than not, it works too. What’s his secret ingredient? Could it be lysine?
0 Yorumlar