The Informant!

The Informant! is Steven Soderbergh's newest movie. I've found Soderbergh's movies pretty entertaining, but nothing really spectacular. The Informant!, though is an underrated masterpiece and Soderbergh's best movie yet.

The movie starts off as a comedy and gradually grows darker. The main protagonist, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) works for a big and powerful company which produces corn. At the beginning of the film we hear Mark's voice-over talking about how important corn is and what his company does. That last part is pretty complicated, but, as Mark says, the important thing to remember is that corn comes in one end and profit comes out of the other. Mark is very devoted to his company. In a very funny scene we see Mark and his family having dinner. Besides their normal dinner, in every plate there is a giant piece of corn which is completely out of place. Mark starts to get calls from a Japanese guy who claims he has a spy in the company and knows all their secrets. This prompts Mark's bosses to call the FBI. Now the movie changes direction. Mark says to the FBI that his company is fixing prizes and that he is willing to provide evidence for it to the FBI. The movie now follows Mark and the FBI trying to frame the company. Mark often narrates to us, but he is an unreliable narrator. Often he suddenly starts to talk about polar bears and the composure of sweaters. During the investigation he also climbs the ranks of his company, so he gets second thoughts about his cooperation with the FBI. Unfortunately for him, the FBI now knows too much and they will go on investigating anyway. If Mark stops his cooperation with them he'll have to go down with his company. Mark then naturally goes on cooperating and one day they finally get the needed evidence. But the movie doesn't end here and has a surprising and great third act up its sleeve. Turns out, during the investigation Mark has embezzled money from his company and acts as if that is no big deal. We now slowly begin to realize that Mark may not be completely sane. He gets a lawyer that tries to help him, but with every meeting with his lawyer Mark admits to more wrongdoings, even though he always finishes the previous one by telling that now he has really told him everything. It's not entirely Mark's fault. He has bipolar disorder and he is a compulsive liar. We learn that he lied about being adopted and that his parents are dead. They are alive and well. In a masterful scene near the end of the movie, Mark has forged a letter from his doctor, claiming that Mark should not be punished for his crimes because of his bipolar disorder. When the FBI confronts him on this, he tries to lie himself out of the situation. This is done very well. First we hear in a voice-over what Mark thinks he has to say. He sure thinks fast and he has a retort for everything the agent says. But while he sounds confident in his thoughts, when he says it all loud he doesn't sound all that confident and he never says exactly what he wants to say. He is, of course, caught and goes to jail. At the end I was very surprised to learn that this was based on a true story.

This movie is a great example that style is very important in movies. There are quite a lot of movies with this content, but none of them are this good. There are some important aspects that make this movie very good. First of all, there is the voice-over. In most movies the voice-over is used to explain or narrate the story to us. The person that narrates the voice-over always seems to know that he or she narrates it to someone. That is not the case here. The voice-over has no function to the story at all and consists mostly of Mark's random thoughts about random things. We could say that he is a unreliable narrator, but at the end we realize that Mark is not even a narrator. We just explicitly hear his thoughts and he has no idea of it.

Then there is Matt Damon's performance. It's his best yet. Damon has made a career of playing troubled geniuses, smart crooks and spies. His role as Mark Whitacre is a combination of all of them. If Will Hunting never met his shrink, he might have had ended up as Mark.

In the end it's worth noting, something about the score of this movie. The score is a very important and big part of what makes this movie so good. But I can't comment much about this, since I hardly know anything about composing music. Anyway, the composer is Marvin Hamlisch, a composer from the 1970's. I've read that he composed the movie like a 70's crime movie and it actually feels that way. The score is at the beginning incredibly goofy and grows darker, just like the movie does.