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Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre in The Informant |
Damon is born again as office supergrass
THE INFORMANT
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Certificate 15
IT’S not an easy ask to make a film about an agricultural manufacturing company that may (or may not) be involved in price-fixing for an obscure chemical that helps crops grow.
Sounds a yawn, doesn’t it?
But this comedy, based on a true story, fairly sails by – and it is mainly down to the standout lead performance given by Matt Damon.
Damon plays Mark Whitacre, who we discover was a mainstay of an agricultural industrial mega-firm called ADM. A biochemist by trade, he had wiggled into a management positions and had his eye on a chief executive role at the Illinois company.
That is, until he decided his company’s underhand price-fixing deals with Japanese competitors were not the done thing and sang to the FBI – thinking he would be handed a hefty promotion for weeding out bad practices at the company.
As I said, it could be rather a dry film. White-collar crimes lack the pizazz of a stick-up, even if, as Whitacre points out, price-fixing means “everyone in this country is a victim of corporate crime by the time they finish breakfast”.
But as he begins to record his colleagues as they go about doing their dodgy dealings, Damon’s character begins to think of himself as a bit of a Jason Bourne, secret agent. His allegations against his fellow workers begin to take on a bizarre tinge and, after a while, his two handlers wonder what, if anything, they can trust from their well-placed supergrass.
Damon’s ability to waddle like an overweight duck across darkened car parks, sweat profusely as he spills beans and generally launch into chemical equations in wonderful boardroom diatribes means every scene has a well-paced comic element to it.
He has proved here he is not simply a good-looking lead. His time as Bourne has long gone – if you look at this overweight geek with a comb-over and terrible moustache, Bourne’s ability to fend off a series of spy agencies is a distant memory, as is his appearances in other Soderbergh heist films, namely Oceans 11, 12 and 13.
The rest of the cast also shine: his faithful wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) is a great stand-by-your-man character, and his two FBI handlers (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) also provide a Thomson and Thompson-style approach to detective work as they try to unravel which parts of Whitacre’s stories are the truth, and what simply stems from his wonderfully eccentric and active imagination.
With a premise that is based on white-collar crime in the agricultural industry, this comedy has to be lively as well as original – something Soderbergh has cleverly achieved. |
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