Have we done The Informant! yet?

[superluser]

Okay, so I'm about three weeks behind on this one, which is sad because I was looking forward to it.

The Informant! is basically the real-life story of Mark Whitacre, who was the informant responsible for exposing a scheme involving Archer Daniels Midland and other companies to fix the price of Lysine globally.  It's based on a book and was supposedly adapted after someone heard this episode of This American Life (highly recommended).

The prosecution was responsible for what was at the time the largest antitrust penalty ever, and also changed the way investigators thought about corporate crime (prior to that, everyone thought that a bunch of execs meeting to order an underling ``Go break the law'' was a myth).  Whitacre was a cooperating witness on an unprecedented scale.  That is, until something happened.

The film begins with the lysine division losing money due to a virus.  After a phone call to Whitacre, the company is told that there's a mole who is planting the virus.  ADM calls the FBI in, Whitacre agrees to spy on the mole, and while they're tapping his phone, Whitacre comes clean about the price fixing and tells them that at the behest of the boss's right hand man, he told the FBI to tap the wrong line.

After some initial skepticism, the FBI convinces Whitacre to wear a wire and he shows an impeccable ability to get people to say what the FBI needs.  Unfortunately, his desire to talk and reveal secrets gets him into trouble and things don't go smoothly for him.

Soderbergh does a decent job directing.  The soundtrack, by Marvin Hamlisch, was very well done and the titles and captions are all done in a font and color that suggest that the characters were all left in the 1970s while everyone else is living in the 1990s.  Matt Damon (with fake nose and real paunch) does such a good job mimicing Whitacre that when they showed a real picture of Whitacre at the end, it took me a second to realize that it wasn't Matt Damon.  Soderbergh's emphasis on language and communication is also evident in this film as Damon provides a rambling monologue on such subjects as polar bear noses or the colors of butterflies, which helps to illustrate his mental problems as he gets more and more involved as an informant.  The rest of the characters are mainly cast as (very good) caricatures of the roles they're meant to be playing, which heightens the comedy at the expense of humanizing them.

The film is not a laugh riot, being more a dark and subdued comedy, but there are a few really good laugh-out-loud moments as Whitacre digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole.  I would definitely recommend this film, though I have to admit that it wasn't as good as I'd hoped.

One final fun bit: there's a brief scene where Eddie Jemison discusses the mole with Whitacre, the spy.  Jemison's character in an earlier Soderbergh film was obsessed with the identities of a mole and a spy, coming up with bizarre theories that wind up being not quite as bizarre as what really happened in this case.