You never quite know what you’re going to get with director Steven Soderbergh. Will it be a serious piece of filmmaking like Traffic, a piece of glossy fun like Ocean’s Eleven or a weird and experimental failure like Bubble? With The Informant!, Soderbergh hedges his bets, combining all his various tendencies into a strange but mainly compelling examination of a very odd man, helped by a bravura performance by a pudged-up Matt Damon.
The story on which the film is based is true, but it’s so odd that it sounds like fiction. Mark Whitacre (Damon) stumbled onto his company, a food production giant, being involved in a particularly shady example of price fixing, and went to the FBI with his claims, which were soon confirmed. Whitacre was then involved in various shenanigans, including having to wear a wire to business meetings which were simultaneously secretly filmed. Unfortunately for the FBI, it soon became clear that Whitacre was a serial fantasist, whose own crimes were much more significant than the ones he was reporting.
Soderbergh layers this fascinating story with some subtly alienating artistic touches, such as a score by Marvin Hamlisch, the Broadway composer, which sounds like something out of Austin Powers. Damon is superb as Whitacre, peppering his actions with a near-constant, apparently irrelevant voiceover that throws up unexpected moments of hilarity, and a strong supporting cast includes Scott ‘Quantum Leap’ Bakula as his permanently exasperated FBI contact and Melanie ‘the one who wasn’t Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures’ Lynskey as his faithful wife. And, by the end, the humour is undercut by a note of poignancy which deepens the Whitacre character, making him, finally, an almost sympathetic figure, despite all the absurd things he did.
Out November 20th.
