The Informant!

The nutty ‘Informant!’: Damon plays delusional hero for laughs

September 18, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

‘The Informant!’’ feels like Steven Soderbergh was still high on the fumes of the “Ocean’s Eleven’’ movies when he made it. It’s bright and perky, with a naggingly effervescent score by Marvin Hamlisch that channels late ’60s game shows and never shuts up, even when you want it to. Soderbergh’s pushing the limits of our indulgence here, spinning a story of white-collar greed and bipolar delusions into intentionally shallow pop farce. The movie’s fun to watch, but you can tell it was a lot more fun to make, and that’s a problem. The party stays up on the screen; down here, it’s been over for a year.

That the movie works as well as it does is due to Matt Damon, who plays the real-life corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre with comic verve and a really bad head of hair. Starting in the early 1990s, Whitacre, the youngest divisional president in the history of agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, worked with the FBI to document a huge price-fixing scheme in which ADM and its rivals controlled the market for lysine, an essential amino acid.

“The Informant!’’ - even the title surges with peppy irony - is based on a book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, which made the most of Whitacre’s dysfunctions. Unknown to the agency, their insider had dirty hands himself and was more than a little unhinged. Led by Special Agent Brian Shepard (a wonderfully woe-faced Scott Bakula), the Feds saw Whitacre as their ace in the hole. In Whitacre’s own mind, he was “Secret Agent 0014, ’cause I’m twice as smart as 007.’’ The comedy - the movie’s entire point, really - is in that yawning gulf between the FBI’s expectations and their mole’s nuttiness. It’s like you’re getting two Russell Crowe movies for the price of one: “The Insider’’ and “A Beautiful Mind.’’

Whitacre’s mind is anything but beautiful. As voiced by Damon in chatty internal monologues that only slowly reveal their disconnect, the whistle-blower’s mental landscape is both grandiose and banal. A typical ramble: “Polar bears cover their noses when waiting for seals to surface. How do they know their noses are black? That seems like a lot of thinking for bears.’’ This while he’s supposed to be absorbing instructions from the FBI agents.