At home, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) has a business line and a personal line. You should know that because the FBI does, and so do his bosses at Archer Daniels Midland ("Supermarket To The World"™). Mark is pretty good at compartmentalizing his life, but the lines are about to get crossed a little bit.
Mark lives with his wife and kids in Decatur, IL, but he's been all over the world with ADM and he's proud of what they do, especially with corn. They make all kinds of stuff out of plain old corn, from high fructose corn syrup to lysine to ethanol -- all of which, you might say, are fuel additives, designed to juice up production of... whatever.
Celebrating ADM's miraculous line of alchemical products, Mark excitedly notes: "Corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other!" Vivid image, that. Kind of suggests Mark's chronic logorrhoea, the stream of partially digested thoughts that swirls around inside his head and occasionally gushes from his mouth. When he gets going his internal monologue (in voiceover) actually talks right over his lips and his tongue. He doesn't interrupt himself; his mouth and his brain just keep spilling over each other. I wouldn't be surprised if Damon's Mark Whitacre had a cousin named Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo.
I'm not going to tell you much of anything about the story of "The Informant!" but if you haven't seen it I recommend you do so before reading beyond this paragraph. This movie is a tonal tightrope act -- a satirical comedy (based on a true story -- really!) set in the early 1990s but done in the style of a '70s Michael Ritchie film (slightly fuzzy, washed-out Eastmancolor) with day-glo titles in post-psychedelic fonts and a zippy, cartoonishly orchestrated score by Marvin Hamlisch (Himself!) that channels Mancini and Esquivel. (Think of how the circus music cuts through Larry David's sitcom-of-discomfort "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and you'll have a sense of what Hamlisch's goofball muzak accomplishes here.)
His marquee-name movie star aside, Soderbergh has cast "The Informant!" with a few actors best known for their television series work (Scott Bakula of "Quantum Leap"; Melanie Lynskey of "Two and a Half Men") and surrounded them with comedians and stand-ups in virtually all the supporting roles: Joel McHale, Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Thomkins, Rick Overton, Scott Adsit, Tony Hale, Tom and Dick Smothers, Bob Zany... It's ingenious. The movie is about something quite serious -- a real-life whistleblower case that would normally be the stuff of Hollywood drama -- but it keeps tilting unsettlingly toward comedy. At its core, I think, it's about people who behave one way at home and another at work, and the difficulty of reconciling the two. Some corporate citizens do terrible, dishonest things on the job, but think those deeds don't follow them home (or vice-versa). They hug their kids, give to charity, convince themselves that they're not moral monsters because, after all, it's just business...
"The Informant!" would make a terrific double-bill with Michael Mann's "The Insider" (1999), or George Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002), or Michael Ritchie's "Smile" (1975), or Bobby Ray's "Breach" (2007) and "Shattered Glass" (2003), or David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), or Soderbergh's own "Erin Brockovich" (2000) or just about any '70s paranoia thriller -- "The Parallax View," "All the President's Men," "Three Days of the Condor." (It would play off splendidly against any of Damon's Bourne movies, too.) Each of them would highlight elements in "The Informant!" like an accompanying dish that brings out particular flavor profiles in a meal.
Apropos of almost-something early in the film, Marc thinks: "There should be a TV show about a guy who calls home one day -- and he's there. He answers -- he's talking to himself only it's someone else. He's somehow divided into two and the second one of him drives away and the rest of the show is about him trying to find the guy..." "The Informant!," in effect, becomes that show. (And if his description sounds somewhat familiar, think of "The Fugitive" combined with the Mystery Man [Robert Blake] in "Lost Highway": I'm at your house right now. Call me.)
What starts out as a tale of price-fixing and capitalist intrigue becomes another kind of mystery, the mystery of Mark. I mean, who is this guy? What is he doing and why is he doing it? We watch as the movie watches him watching himself be watched, and he watches his watchers. It becomes a voyeuristic exercise and an appreciation of Mark's ability to construct and reconstruct his identity on the fly. But how many of Mark's moves are scripted and how many are improvised, and does his left hand know what his right hand is doing? As the plot unravels, so does Mark, and the fun of the movie is watching for the tells -- the odd, unsettling and often perplexingly funny moments you just can't quite shrug off. Like the odd way he's positioned in the frame, recurring patterns in his language, the details he obsesses over, the way his hair moves almost imperceptibly when he touches it...
Richard Corliss wrote: "'The Informant!' says that people who do good or ill have complex motives for their actions, and that not everyone is knowable, instantly or ever." Funny. That's one hell of a mystery.
I also quite enjoyed this character piece, especially because of the incredibly fun performance by Damon. The most important part of his performance, to me, is the way he's always so matter of fact about the incriminating secrets he's suddenly revealing to the people around him, as if they were part of a completely normal behavior and should seem justified to everyone.
It brings back flashbacks from so many revelations by the recent business crooks who, at first, can't see why they were caught. It's always as if those guys have been living in an alternate reality all along... which is decidedly where Mark Whitacre is for the duration of this movie. "Normal" people (the audience and the characters around him, his wife the best example) can see him from the real world, and they can think they understand him, but they're judging from a universe that doesn't share much with Whitacre's own.
JE: Yes -- very well said! He's never quite where he seems to be -- or where other people think he is. (Call him. Is he on the business line or the personal line?)
I'll echo the sentiments about Damon's performance. It's key to the movie's success and it's a credit to his ability that seeing it a second time, knowing what we know (and don't know) at the end, that the film not only holds together but becomes a deeper, richer, funnier and more intriguing study of this guy who though we hear some of his thoughts, has an entire different world inside his head, as we all do, though his constantly spinning, identity behind identity.
One of my favorite things in the entire movie is the way Soderbergh (operating his own Red One camera) does the reoccurring tracking shots of Whitacre walking into his office. They have a jitteryness to them that reminds me of 70s movies when camera became light weight enough to gun it on a dolly or a Steadicam, there's a real sense of movement and the physical effects of that movement that give the shots an energy that adds to Whitacre's stream of conscious voice over and greeting of personnel. It's almost as if Whitacre is racing to his office to be alone again with his own mind, to attend to some mental business and then get into character as a rising corporate star, a spy, a family man, a criminal.
All your hypothetical double bills sound great (although "Lost Highway" seems a bit out of left field), but I think the movie this most reminded me of was "Shattered Glass" with Hayden Christiansen and Peter Sarsgaard about Stephen Glass.
Both films tell the true stories of men who recklessly through their professional ethics out the window assuming they'd get away with it, and then when things start to come to light, they keep telling lie after lie after lie until they're dug in so deep that characters played by Melanie Lynskey have to disown them.
I find these stories fascinating, especially because they're true. They affirm my suspicion that a lot of the really immoral things people do are caused by most people's inability to think about the consequences of their actions. It's really easy to accept kickbacks (or make up a magazine story) when you don't think you'll ever get caught.
JE: Good call! I'm adding that one to the list! ("Lost Highway" works because it is about a man who has so compartmentalized his psyche that he actually splits -- like the TV show Mark describes.)
I liked the film a lot too.
Interesting that throughout much of the film, I was laughing at Mark's stupefying decisions, wondering what the hell he was thinking- and when he's finally asked "Why are you lying? What are you doing this?"- Damon plays the scene perfectly. Understated and completely heartbreaking.
"I don't know" is all he says there, once he realizes he's in the corner with not even the narrowest escape left. (J.K. Simmons' character from Burn After Reading couldn't have summed it up any better!)
Heartbreaking and, still, oddly funny.
Also, I'm sure I annoyed my fellow film goers, as I busted out laughing almost every time Hamlisch's
score kicked in.
Calling the movie a tonal tightrope act is dead accurate. How little would it take to transform this film from a satire into a serious corporate thriller like The Insider or even a 'spy' film? All the elements are there; a corporate fraud scheme, a globetrotting, multilingual protagonist and wire taps! Minimal effort would be necessary. Swap this film's score with The Firm's, toss out the voiceovers and add a chase scene and voila. Corporate thriller. Among other things, I think this movie is a commentary on how closely many corporate thrillers toe the line of being shallow and formulaic.
Another suggested film for the double bill would be "Fargo". I found a lot of similarities between William H Macy's character there and Damon's here. Even though Macy's character is obviously far more of a simpleton, the way they got in over their head and never quite understood their guilt or wrongdoing was similar. As well as the almost friendly and neighborly (Midwestern?) way they handled their crooked behavior.
I don't agree with you on the score, however. I thought it was too zany, too all over the place, and was asked to handle too much of the film's tone. I really enjoyed the way Soderbergh and the casting director cast all these recognizable comic actors in straight roles around Damon — it was a very cool way to make the whole film kind of surreal — and I think along those lines, a more straight score would have been more effective. Or even a score that was similar in tone but more subdued and cool, like in "Duplicity" (the other comedy about corporate espionage this year).
JE: You're darn tootin'! As I said: "I wouldn't be surprised if Damon's Mark Whitacre had a cousin named Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo." I'm sure Hamlisch's score didn't work for some people because it is intrusive -- the kind of thing you definitely notice. But I think it provides another layer of misdirection and tension between the seriousness of what happened and the way it's being presented for our entertainment. Corn goes in one end and a movie comes out the other.
Here's a couple more films for that list: The Hoax (2007), Say Anything (the John Mahoney part) and Owning Mahowny.
How about a double bill with Soderbergh's Schizopolis? That'd be the obvious one, and it's far too little-seen. I know that David Lynch frequently refers to Schizopolis when he discusses Lost Highway, just as much as he refers to the OJ trial.
JE: I just picked up a used DVD of "Schizopolis" a few weeks ago because I liked it quite a lot but don't remember much about it. Gotta try to watch it this weekend!
I'm surprised you didn't include "The Conversation" on the double bill list!
JE: Well, the wiretapping stuff works, the main character's sense of denial works, but I'm not sure how many parallels there actually are between Mark and Harry Caul.
Cool! You put my Shattered Glass comment into the article. (Despite my careless use of 'through' instead of 'threw.' Oops.) Thanks.
Anyway, speaking of Damon's performance and the 'tonal tightrope,' I listened to an interview of Damon and Soderbergh on NPR's Fresh Air, and Soderbergh revealed that he directed Damon to deliver the courtroom monologue -- in which Whitacre expresses remorse -- as if it were an awards show acceptance speech. I found this approach to be hilarious and brilliant, since it just goes to show just how insincere all of Whitacre's apologies really were (much like Glass's pathetically teary apologies).
Yes, he regrets getting caught, but does he truly regret stealing and lying. I doubt it. On the other hand (as with Glass), it raises questions about what happens when we begin to live our lives as performance. Does going through the motions of regret over and over again eventually lead to the feelings becoming real? If fooling everyone requires that high a level of compartmentalization, does that 'compartment' become a legitimate part of our personality?
JE: What a great piece of direction. Mark clearly thinks he deserves what he takes -- and his life is a repertory of performances. As long as they all stay in their compartments he gets away with it, but when they start bleeding into one another, all those personalities come into conflict.
The film that I kept thinking of as I watched this was BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, about F. Ross Johnson's failed attempt to buy R.J.R. Nabisco and the ridiculous war of escalation against rival buyout artist Henry Kravis. Larry Gelbart's screenplay plays this event for the farce that it was, showing people with too much money going way overboard with their greed while regular America scrapes for change. Both films I think have to be staged as comedy, because if you played them straight (millions lose jobs in the Nabisco buyout, the FBI fails to curb corporate malfeasance because they trusted the wrong man), the audience would be depressed beyond belief.
Jack, as Kurt Vonnegut said, We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
I haven't seen the movie since it first came out, but wasn't there a moment near the end of Shattered Glass when he knows peter Sarsgaard has him and he's about to be thrown out of the office so he won't even have an opportunity to tamper or remove any evidence, and then he breaks down and says he shouldn't leave because he might hurt himself? Was that phony, or was that his first honest moment?
Another movie for the list would be The Man Who Wasn't There, which is also an excellent example of an unreliable narrator ("I never saw myself as the barber.") and how hedictates the style and soundtrack of the film.
Hmmm, you're probably right about there not being all that many parallels between Caul and Whitacre. But aside from "Lost Highway", other Lynch work has dealt with compartmentalized psyches as well, the two films that stick out are "Mulholland Dr." and "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me", although their connections to "The Informant!"are rather tenuous I guess.
I'm not sure how much connection the movies have overall, but the opening credits sequence, with its soft, slow melody playing over a short mechanical process (the tape) reminded me of the airplane refueling credits in Dr. Strangelove. (Well, compartmentalization is certainly a factor there. Buck's work and sex lives intersect hilariously in phone calls, Jack D. Ripper lives in a completely different world than everyone else, and Peter Sellers is split in three.)
I adored The Informant! The score was a great choice, suggesting a kind of perpetual self-satisfying inner machinery: Mark's brain just keeps going and going, self-congratulating and focusing on narratives that interest him (about biology, chemistry, or his own heroism/victimization) again and again. One of my faves I've seen this year.
Dan,
Indeed, the scene you describe does occur near the end of Shattered Glass. The film was made with the cooperation of many of the real life figures (but not Glass), and I'm fairly certain that that scene is based on a real conversation between Glass and his editor. Whether it's more b.s. is open to interpretation.
Personally, I don't think Glass is being when he says he's afraid he might hurt himself. I view it this way: All throughout the movie, as his lies are uncovered, Glass retreats to new, more defensible lies. At this point, when the Sarsgaard character has figured everything out, Glass still lies in an attempt to create a relatively favorable reality -- namely one where he is pitied rather than hated. But at this point, nothing he says can be believed and Sarsgaard refuses to drive him to the airport.
In a way, Whitacre - as portrayed in The Informant! - is the same way. He refused to be completely honest to the bitter end, as proven in the final scene between Damon and McHale ("Was it 9 or 11?").
I haven't seen the film yet - it's not out in New Zealand yet - but this week's episode of This American Life was a rerun of an episode from 2000 where they tell the story, complete with the audio of the real tapes that Whitacre made. I was looking to the film before, but now I can't wait. If you enjoyed the film then you may find the radio show interesting.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=168
I liked it for the above reasons but I didn't find it very funny. The "human comedy" beats felt shoehorned in and didn't flow naturally with the sort of removed, almost documentary style vision of the characters. Tom Papa's rant about the hot co-worker, the personal injury lawyer and all the "subtle" ha-ha moments like Bakula's "Who? Us?" didn't really gel for me. It lacked the unity of plot and humor of a movie like "Day for Night" or Altman's "Cookie's Fortune."
I may have enjoyed the escalation of the story more if it hadn't been spoiled for me in a couple reviews. I should never read reviews before I see a movie, anyway. I hope Matt Damon gets a nomination.
I have not seen the film. I will not see the film. I have read the book. I own the book. It is by Kurt Eichenwald; the title of the book is the same as the movie but lacks the exclamation point, and it is an absorbing, detailed, well-written book. Read it. It is a real story about real people that does not smirk at you. Then if you want to see the movie and subject yourself to smirking, then by all means go ahead.
Want to get mad? Read Eichenwald's first book, "Serpent on the Rock". Want to shake your head in dismay? Read his third book, "Conspiracy of Fools".
Jack, thanks for the responase. Your take makes sense, but since Glass seems to hold his esteem completely in what people think of him, I could see how he might feel momentarily panicked when he knows he's out of control. Of course it could just be cowardice.
Another good one for the double-bill is "The Talented Mr. Ripley", which also walks a tonal line, between comedy and thriller (tipping decidedly towards the latter near the end, though), and of course which also features Matt Damon in a brilliant performance as a compulsive liar and manipulator. (And hey, he uses prop glasses to great effect in that one, too.)
An interesting detail I learned during a Q and A--there was actually a scene in the script where Mark tried to commit suicide, which Soderbergh deleted in order to help push the balance of the film towards commentary.
Personally, I really enjoyed the way the film shifted from a goofy spy thriller (and corporate satire) to a goofy/tragic character study. Especially the way the voice-overs start out seeming totally unrelated and only later you start interpreting them in terms of Mark's problems...
You never do get to know Mark as a person, or if I think about it, you do. He is conniving in a bumbling-I'm-innocent kinda way. But you never do see him in his home-life personality, save for a few moments. Jim, you never did mention the mental health angle. Do you think that weighs into the story/Mark's actions? He seems to be perpetually in the same mental state throughout the film even after his demise.
Oof. I can't believe I missed your Fargo comment.
Can I instead suggest the documentary "King Corn" as part of a double-bill, or is it too on-the-nose?
I have a question, Jim: I've seen a lot of reviews of "The Informant!" on Metacritic where the critics say that the film was possibly "more fun to make then it is to watch". Because of those opinions, I hesitated to see the film last weekend- I've been to other Soderbergh releases that I found boring as hell because the actors spent the entire time acting suave without offering a lick of entertainment value ("Ocean's Twelve", for example).
But how about this movie? Is it another one of Soderbergh's studio pictures that he makes at least once every year? Or is it a more personal project like "Bubble", for instance?
JE: I'd say "The Informant!" is somewhere in the middle -- neither as commercial as "Erin Brockovich" or the "Ocean's" movies (I've only seen the first one) or as experimental and idiosyncratic as "Bubble" (or "Schizopolis" or "Full Frontal"). Perfectly accessible, but a bit askew in ways I find interesting. (I find it more complex and involving that his "small" movie from earlier in the year, "The Girlfriend Experience.") It's a movie that could play at multiplexes AND art houses -- if we make those kinds of distinctions anymore...
This movie is a horribly failed attempt at camp humor wrapped in a plodding documentary about a story that actually could have been interesting.
The story about the man calling himself mentioned by Whitacre in his voice-over: it was part of the first show in "The New Twilight Zone," CBS's 80's attempt to revive the show. It was called "Shatterday" (based on a story by Harlan Ellison) adapted by Allan Brennert and directed by Wes Craven. It starred Bruce Willis, and it, too, is about compartmentalization. The story is quite different, with a definite ending (as opposed to Whitacre's on-going story, which a reflection of his own strung-out subterfuge)
It even shows up on YouTube-the first part is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQejXCXsnow