Matt Damon Movie:

Editorial Review:
Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!--like the director's one-two Oscar® punch, Erin Brockovich and Traffic--is an energetic exposé of corporate/criminal chicanery with wide-ranging implications for life in these United States. Not so much like those movies, it plays as hyper-caffeinated comedy. At its center is Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a biochemist and junior executive at agri-giant Archer Daniels Midland who, in 1992, began feeding the FBI evidence of ADM's involvement in price fixing. Mark's motive for doing so is elusive, sometimes self-contradictory, and subject to mutation at any moment. To describe him as bipolar would be akin to finding the Marx Brothers somewhat zany. His Fed handlers, along with the audience, start thinking of him as a hapless goofball. Then they and we get blind-sided with the revelation of further dimensions of Mark's life at ADM, and the nature of the investigation--and the movie--changes. That will happen again. And again. It's Soderbergh's ingenious strategy to make us fellow travelers on Mark's crazy ride, virtually infecting us with a short-term version of his dysfunctionality.

Props to screenwriter Scott Z. Burns for boiling down Kurt Eichenwald's 600-page book The Informant: A True Story without sacrificing coherence. And Matt Damon, bulked up by 30 pounds and spluttering his manic lines from under a caterpillar mustache, reconfirms his virtuosity and his willingness to dive deep into such a dodgy personality. On the downside, despite a small army of comedians in cameo roles, The Informant! has nothing like the rich field of subsidiary characters encountered in Erin Brockovich and Traffic. That lack of vibrancy is aggravated by the dominance of prairie-flat Midwest speech patterns and cadences (most of the film unreels in Illinois), and the razzmatazz score by veteran tunesmith Marvin Hamlisch sounds like pep-rally music on an industrial film. Soderbergh also photographed the movie (under his pseudonym Peter Andrews), and his decision to show everything through a corn-mush filter turns it into a big-screen YouTube experience. --Richard T. Jameson

The Informant! [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Weird enough to be true...
2009-11-29 - This is a great story about corporate crimes of different kinds.

What I liked especially about it is that it's crafted in a way that you will start to feel a bit bored after a while, and wonder if the director lost the plot. But then the layers surrounding the main character start to unravel, and the story starts to get curiouser!

Matt Damon has put in a great performance, and so has the actress who plays his wife. Right at the end, Damon's character says a line which I thought would be the perfect end to the film, and it turned out it was the end - I loved it.

You may not want to see it again soon, but it's definitely highly watchable once.

starts out slow but gets good and funny
2009-11-09 - There were a lot of funny parts to this movie. I'll admit it started out very slow and confusing. I didn't have a lot of history on the movie so wasn't sure what was going on at first. But it got better as the movie went on. Some reviewers here like Jason didn't like it probably because it doesn't involve blowing peoples heads off. But it had a lot of subtleties and resembled how something like that might have happened instead of some fantastic story.
The movie is about a guy who works for a company that makes products from corn that go into everyday foods and the company is involved in price fixing with their competitors. Basically Damons character - Whitacre devised a little plan that he thought might end up with him running the whole company. But he got too greedy and tried to play the FBI and his company and ended up screwing himself over. If you blow the whistle on someone, while at the same time are involved in something else illegal, you're still a criminal too and thats what happened to Whitacre.
Matt Damon played this role very well and you could see that Whitacre, a habitual liar, would almost believe his own lies and couldn't even differentiate the lies from the truth.

The charisma of the informant.
2009-10-16 - "The Informat", directed by Steven Soderbergh ("Solaris", "Sex, Lies, and Videotape"), is a hilarious dark comedy based on a true story. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an employee at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), who whistle blows on the company's price-fixing tactics. Mark Whitacre, has a problem though, he's a pathological liar, and his lies get bigger and bigger, and ensnare more and more people, to the point where the FBI (represented by Scott Bakula, and Joel McHale), and everybody else, get tangled in his ever growing web. His dissociation (bi-polar disease) from reality leads him to believe that he will actually be the new head of the company once his superiors are removed for their wrongdoing. Believing everything he says himself, he's easily able to convince others, who remarkably fail to see his lies because of a combination of their eagerness to see what they want to see, and their willingness to see things through Mark's eyes because of his innocent demeanor. The music by Marvin Hamlisch wonderfully mocks the out of touch with reality, la la land that Mark lives in, but it's a reality that is amusingly real enough that it can turn everybody around him into bumbling clowns that fall prey to his delusions. "The Informat" is an intriguing film that borders on great in how it shows us in a humorous way just how gullible and easily manipulated people can be when confronted with someone who believes in their own lies.

I wish someone would have informed me!
2009-10-12 - Rehashing the tale of corporate whistleblower Mark Whitacre, director Steven Soderbergh decided to play this one close to the vest by attempting to weave an intricate collection of scenes into an Ocean's Fourteen, only without Clooney and Pitt. With Ocean's Eleven (or the other two), everything looks like a complicated sailor's knot: the viewer is not sure of the outcome and is convinced that something is out of place. Upon completion we find out every twist and turn was necessary to make the knot work. With The Informant, however, the knot ends up like five day old spaghetti; sloppy and unpalatable.

ADM fast-tracker Whitacre (Damon) works in the lysine developing section of ADM and is a bipolar, pathological liar. Leading a stuffy duplicitous life required of a top executive bringing down his own company, Whitacre exposes an international price-fixing scam by working closely with the FBI over the course of three years, during which time his lies destroy the investigation and his life.

Stylistically it's a pleasant look back twenty years or so, almost like watching an extended cut of Mad Men...except not as biting. The most entertaining aspect of this film is Mark Hamlisch's score. Quirky and upbeat, it supplies contextual support like choppy violin strokes during a tip-toeing Tom and Jerry scene. Oblivious to the world around him, Whitacre could very well hear the pseudo-Muzak elevator music that oftentimes accompanies his irrelevant, schizophrenic non sequiturs - the only entertaining aspect of the film.

A convoluted, cinematic sedative, the entirety of The Informant! is at best mildly interesting, but at worst coma-inducing monotony. During the rare scenes when the movie is not Sahara desert dry, it's almost sanctimonious. Just like Burn After Reading, some Soderbergh sycophants will claim that those giving negative reviews have "missed the point." If by "missed the point" they mean "incredibly boring to the extent of almost persuading me to leave the theatre mid-movie," then I suppose they're correct.

Educational, entertaining, and documentary.
2009-10-11 - The movie would definitely serve as a legal documentary for those interested in legal matters since it entails the role of mental illness in management, marriage, and role of government. Without the incident of mental hardship, the government might have never caught up with the involved white collar criminals. Most of the folks who watched the movie with me fell within very narrow segment of educated adults. There were no teens or blue collar-appearing viewers that I could spot.

The diverse issues of industrial technology, international trade, government legal obligations, and personal motivations, the movie focuses on the consequences of having a mentally unstable crook getting his peers in hot water. The contemporary nature of the story and its elaborate legal documentation helped the producer in carving very accurate personal profile of a manic depressive individual. Not only the ill person damaged his own perspectives of maintaining employment and family, but also did he dragged his own spouse to believe in his bizarre views of reality.

The movie succeeded in portraying the contrast between the affluent and spoiled private professionals with the impoverished yet scrupulous government officials. The movie also succeeded in displaying the even hands of law of punishing a criminal, despite his mental illness, on the grounds of his intent to gain by destroying his peers instead of promoting public interest.

The strength of the movie lies in its perfect choice of actors who could play realistic roles of real people. The private business professionals sounded well-groomed and pampered with all means of modernity. The government officials appeared marginal on personal appearance and well being. You could easily tell the difference between those who hung to the government payroll and appeared like drained, burned individuals, versus those immersed in a fast-paced greedy industry with unbounded resources and consequences.