Matt Damon four-putts his role as Mark Whitacre.
The Informant, 2009
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
* (of five)
It stars Matt Damon, it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, and it’s a comedy/mystery. It must be good, right? Nope. Lest you be tempted to waste your money, let me reveal the mystery: they all did it. Everyone you see is a bandit—except for the FBI, which is merely inept.
The Informant is based loosely—very loosely—on the sordid actions of two crooks that deserved each other, the corporation Archer Daniels Midland and whistleblower Mark Whitacre. ADM was (and probably still is) a band of attaché-carrying pirates that manipulated worldwide food prices and divvied up market shares with competitors. In promoting former biochemist Whitacre to management, ADM officials finally met their match. Company leaders were merely immoral, whereas Whitacre was totally amoral, a pathological liar and passive-aggressive schemer with a bad hairpiece and a Napoleon complex. Whitacre conjured an elaborate ruse in which he was, simultaneously, the saboteur ruining ADM’s Lycene supply, the key witness in an invented international industrial espionage ring, the putative fall guy for ADM’s declining profits, and the FBI’s point man in securing proof against the company’s illegal cartel activites. In the end Whitacre’s house of cards collapsed and the informant became the defendant; he and several ADM executives go to jail. It’s the classic crook trying to steal from crooks being robbed by other crooks scenario that we’ve seen played with wit and incisiveness in movies such as Duplicity and Michael Clayton.
In the hands of edgier direction, the Coen brothers for instance, this film could have been a devastating critique of Midwestern family values á la Fargo. If it had the hard-boiled flair for deadly deception of Mike Nichols it might have been another Silkwood. An ear for heartless business-speak might have led to another In the Company of Men sans the misogyny. Instead Soderberg opts for a goofy and bite-less nerdiness that makes The Informant seem like a weak Get Smart episode circa 1970. It even looks a bit like Get Smart; although the Mark Whitacre case took place in the 1990s, the costuming and the font used for interstitial scene changes suggest the 1970s, as do Damon’s loud, wide ties. The FBI parallels Maxwell Smart’s Control in that the agency is staffed by clueless bumblers who couldn’t follow a one-lane highway with a GPS system. As all of this suggests, the film has no real characters, merely caricatures—too broadly drawn to be convincing, and too wooden to be funny. Also lacking is scintillating dialogue, witty repartee, sight gags, or poignant irony—pretty much everything necessary to make a funny film. The closest The Informant gets to comedy is a pervasive unsettling awkwardness, as if it we were watching a clumsy teen’s first slow dance.
Matt Damon reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role so he’d look more like the pudgy Whitacre. Damon has bulk, but little comedic weight. He's not horrible in The Informant, merely ineffective and unaffecting. Looking the part hardly matters when one delivers a performance that any second-rate TV actor could have turned in for a considerably smaller paycheck. Damon’s filmography isn’t littered with comedic roles, perhaps because he has little flair for it. Damon only snaps to life when he moves from comedy to the furtive dangerousness that he exhibits in films such as The Bourne Identity and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Informant, 2009
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
* (of five)
It stars Matt Damon, it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, and it’s a comedy/mystery. It must be good, right? Nope. Lest you be tempted to waste your money, let me reveal the mystery: they all did it. Everyone you see is a bandit—except for the FBI, which is merely inept.
The Informant is based loosely—very loosely—on the sordid actions of two crooks that deserved each other, the corporation Archer Daniels Midland and whistleblower Mark Whitacre. ADM was (and probably still is) a band of attaché-carrying pirates that manipulated worldwide food prices and divvied up market shares with competitors. In promoting former biochemist Whitacre to management, ADM officials finally met their match. Company leaders were merely immoral, whereas Whitacre was totally amoral, a pathological liar and passive-aggressive schemer with a bad hairpiece and a Napoleon complex. Whitacre conjured an elaborate ruse in which he was, simultaneously, the saboteur ruining ADM’s Lycene supply, the key witness in an invented international industrial espionage ring, the putative fall guy for ADM’s declining profits, and the FBI’s point man in securing proof against the company’s illegal cartel activites. In the end Whitacre’s house of cards collapsed and the informant became the defendant; he and several ADM executives go to jail. It’s the classic crook trying to steal from crooks being robbed by other crooks scenario that we’ve seen played with wit and incisiveness in movies such as Duplicity and Michael Clayton.
In the hands of edgier direction, the Coen brothers for instance, this film could have been a devastating critique of Midwestern family values á la Fargo. If it had the hard-boiled flair for deadly deception of Mike Nichols it might have been another Silkwood. An ear for heartless business-speak might have led to another In the Company of Men sans the misogyny. Instead Soderberg opts for a goofy and bite-less nerdiness that makes The Informant seem like a weak Get Smart episode circa 1970. It even looks a bit like Get Smart; although the Mark Whitacre case took place in the 1990s, the costuming and the font used for interstitial scene changes suggest the 1970s, as do Damon’s loud, wide ties. The FBI parallels Maxwell Smart’s Control in that the agency is staffed by clueless bumblers who couldn’t follow a one-lane highway with a GPS system. As all of this suggests, the film has no real characters, merely caricatures—too broadly drawn to be convincing, and too wooden to be funny. Also lacking is scintillating dialogue, witty repartee, sight gags, or poignant irony—pretty much everything necessary to make a funny film. The closest The Informant gets to comedy is a pervasive unsettling awkwardness, as if it we were watching a clumsy teen’s first slow dance.
Matt Damon reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role so he’d look more like the pudgy Whitacre. Damon has bulk, but little comedic weight. He's not horrible in The Informant, merely ineffective and unaffecting. Looking the part hardly matters when one delivers a performance that any second-rate TV actor could have turned in for a considerably smaller paycheck. Damon’s filmography isn’t littered with comedic roles, perhaps because he has little flair for it. Damon only snaps to life when he moves from comedy to the furtive dangerousness that he exhibits in films such as The Bourne Identity and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
But director Steven Soderbergh is the one on the hot seat here. Once one of the industry’s most-promising young directors, Soderbergh seems to be stuck in a Hollywood rut. Since his pathbreaking sex, lies, and videotape (1989) he has directed twenty-six films. A few were decent—Traffic (2000), Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and The Good German (2006)—but only his 2002 remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris scores high on the chance-taking scale (unless you count the unwatchable and unwatched Che). The Informant shows very little directorial panache; the camera work is static, the actors have little brio, and the cinematography is non-descript. In fact, only the only spark in the entire 108 minutes is provided by the jazzy little soundtrack scored by Marvin Hamlisch. This film is the best the Archer Daniels Midland PR department could have hoped for—not good enough to attract a lot of attention and not serious enough to call attention to crimes that made world food needs secondary to corporate greed. ADM bills itself “the supermarket to the world;” Soderbergh’s exposé is strictly from the sugary cereal aisle.
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