The Informant!

by Sam Adams

SECRET AGENT MAN: Matt Damonplays the anti-Jason Bourne in StevenSoderbergh's The Informant!

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: A- ]

Packing on a pot belly and fuzzy moustache, Matt Damon turns Jason Bourne inside out as Mark Whitacre, the self-styled hero of Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! A middle manager at agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland, Whitacre becomes involved in a global scheme to fix the price of the corn additive lysine, and turns FBI stooge when he fears his part will be uncovered. Dubbing himself Agent 0014, "because I'm twice as smart as 007," he collects hundreds of hours of surreptitiously recorded audio and video tapes toward building the government's case. That much, at least, is fact, drawn from Kurt Eichenwald's nonfiction book. But Scott Z. Burns' screenplay doesn't place much emphasis on verisimilitude. The movie opens with the standard-issue warning of dramatic liberties, followed by a snotty, "So there." Whitacre's narration is discursive rather than authoritative, interrupting the spy thriller in progress to relay tidbits on the habits of butterflies, and Marvin Hamlisch's swollen, overripe score is deliberately out of sync with the movie's mundane surroundings. Soderbergh, also the movie's pseudonymous cinematographer, shoots everything in sickly, washed-out shades, giving the film the texture of a motel carpet. There are moments when the movie slips from being wry to merely arch, particularly a string of scenes near the end where Soderbergh casts standup comedians in prominent roles: Patton Oswalt, followed by Paul F. Tompkins, and then by a Smothers Brother. It's like being jabbed in the ribs again and again, and it nearly derails what is otherwise the film's strongest section. Whitacre's daffy delusions start to spin out of control as the investigation gathers steam, and keeping track of its twists and turns starts to grind down our minds, as well. The antic back-and-forths lose their luster, and the movie's surface begins to warp until we don't know what we're watching. Suddenly being a spy doesn't seem like so much fun.