Never quite catches fire...

While the marketing squad at Warner Brothers promoted The Informant! as a loony comedy set within the corporate environment, the trailers are in fact quite misleading. Rather than playing the material as a straightforward mainstream comedy, director Steven Soderbergh has crafted a sophisticated yet disappointingly uneven dark comedy that's unable to attain a smooth rhythm as the story progresses.

The Informant! is the semi-true, semi-fanciful account of Mark Whitacre (Damon), who worked in upper management for a lysine developing company called ADM (Archer Daniels Midland). When he becomes uneasy about a price-fixing scheme at ADM, Mark reveals his concerns to the FBI and agrees to act as an informant to provide evidence to bring the company down. But questions soon begin to emerge. What is Mark getting out of his whistle-blowing? Is he truly a clean and reliable witness, like he initially seems? Uncovering the mysteries regarding Mark and his motives soon becomes of more interest to the FBI than ADM's illegal activities.

To be sure, The Informant! is predominantly a comedy, but it's a specific type of comedy that's difficult to pinpoint. More than anything, the movie's tone is funny - it has an oddball sensibility, a peculiar way of looking at things, and an absurd perspective of Whitacre and the quicksand he proudly matches into. Soderbergh is too sophisticated a filmmaker to simply play the material as a broad, commercial comedy. Instead, the humour is fundamentally dark and the laughs are generated through clever writing, though the filmmakers never lose the sense that the story is essentially a tragedy. However the gambit is not entirely successful, partially because the tricky tightrope walk between comedy and pathos makes the film feel hamstrung at times when it should be cut loose instead. The pacing simply isn't tight enough as well. Even at about 100 minutes, the film lingers for at least a quarter of an hour too long. If the editing had been more aggressive, the picture would have been far stronger. As it is, the material feels stretched beyond its ideal length. If Soderbergh was aiming for a zippy film, he failed.

Soderbergh lensed The Informant! using a lot of the handheld, pseudo-documentary techniques he has been honing over the years. The film's colour scheme is of corporate browns and sickly oranges, providing the movie with the dull paleness of business life in Middle America. To Soderbergh's credit, he knew when to stick to less attention-grabbing compositions when solid storytelling and performances were all that was required to progress the narrative.
One of the greatest pleasures afforded by the movie is the score courtesy of composer Marvin Hamlisch; a music legend who hasn't gone near a motion picture since the late '90s. Hamlisch has created a witty combination of the kind of goofball music he provided for early Woody Allen comedies (think Bananas or Take the Money and Run) and the brand of action-danger-suspense tunes he cooked up for The Spy Who Loved Me. As a matter of fact, Hamlisch's music is slyly appropriate for Mark's character - like him, the score manages to be both disconnected and with it at the same time. The delightful score earned Hamlisch a Golden Globe nomination.

Submitting his best performance since 1998's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon is almost unrecognisable as Mark Whitacre. With his spectacles, furry toupee, moustache and extra weight, Damon is as far from the lean-and-mean Jason Bourne as can be imagined. Additionally, the internal twistiness of the character is amusingly conveyed via earnest voiceover narration that perpetually suggests Whitacre is not always quite with it. While his narration occasionally just comments on the events currently unfolding onscreen, it more often reveals the peculiar randomness of his trail of thought, as well as his deluded inner fantasies (such as the way he constantly compares his dilemma to John Grisham and Michael Crichton novels). Though Damon provides the film's star power, his performance is more along the lines of something you'd expect from a focused character actor rather than a headliner.
Alongside Damon, Melanie Lynskey is wonderful as Mark's wife, as is Scott Bakula who nails the beleaguered sensibility required to pull off the role of Mark's primary FBI contact. In a stroke of genius, Soderbergh rounded out the cast with a selection of stand-ups and comic actors, including Joel McHale, Rick Overton, Bob Zany, Patton Oswalt, Tony Hale, Paul F. Thompkins and the Smothers Brothers.

All things considered, The Informant! never manages to catch fire the way that Soderbergh's best work did, and it lacks the infectious energy that made the Ocean's pictures such a hoot. It's hard to shake off the thought that Soderbergh should've simply settled on one tone and ran with it. The material suggests an edge-of-your-seat nail-biter (even with Whitacre's strange disposition taken into consideration), and a world of comic possibilities lie within the concept of a deluded executive who uses one crime to cover another. If Soderbergh had gone one way, The Informant! could have been a smash. As it stands, it's an uneven experiment. But even so, the movie is at least worth checking out for Matt Damon's performance and a few good moments.

5.8/10