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It’s a cheeky yet fitting indication that, in the wake of his austere work on The Girlfriend Experience and the epic undertaking that was Che, director Steven Soderbergh is gunning for something a bit more playful, a shaggy dog story about a real-life whistle-blower, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), who decides to alert the authorities that his agriculture conglomerate employers are up to no good and only proceeds to further complicate his situation from there.

Oh, if only I could tell you how or why our protagonist does just that, but part of the immediate fun and eventual impact comes from watching the best laid plans of both Whitacre and the F.B.I. come together and fall apart. Amidst all these well-meant deeds, Soderbergh flaunts an over-lit palette that tends to grow harsher with the growing light of day, while Marvin Hamlisch’s thoroughly old-fashioned score is similarly dialed back a bit as the film goes on (though not quite enough to keep it from being a most distracting indulgence, ulterior motives be damned). As for the funkadelic on-screen titles? The film takes place in the ‘90s, not the ‘70s, so your guess is as good as mine.

Helping keep an even keel throughout is Damon’s uniquely dedicated performance, as a man who can’t help but tell anything to everyone, embellishing matters until it feels like he’s living out his own tailor-made variation on Crichton’s Rising Sun or Grisham’s The Firm. His steam-of-consciousness narration, bringing to mind Seann William Scott’s voice-over in last year’s little-seen The Promotion of all things, volleys from nonsensical trivia to self-aggrandizing stratagems in a manner both humorous and telling.

After her own revealing turn in Away We Go earlier this year, Melanie Lynskey goes for 2-for-2 as another supportive spouse, while a supporting cast of stand-ups and comedic actors that includes the likes of Andrew Daly, Patton Oswalt, Tony Hale, Joel McHale, Paul F. Tompkins and the Smothers Brothers are asked to play their parts straight in what may be the film’s biggest joke of all.

The Informant! isn’t quite the flippant farce that the marketing or even the first hour might have you believe, but rather a dark-ish comedy whose follies grow increasingly and intentionally transparent as its lead bumbles along, unaware of how very consequential his actions will be. Like a work of sandpaper origami, it’s delicately crafted, drier than the desert and almost exclusively amusing for its sheer peculiarity.

So there.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=18070&reviewer=409
originally posted: 09/19/09 05:59:45
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