The Informant!, Soderbergh’s Latest Inside Joke
The Informant! is a Steven Soderbergh corporate caper based on a book called The Informant. The added exclamation point tells you everything — this movie is really fun! And wacky! Just like Matt Damon’s poofy hair!
Actually, The Informant! is a comedy catastrophe. Picture Catch Me If You Can with a slimy little weasel instead of a charming rogue, and you’re halfway there.
Damon brings maximum goofiness to his portrayal of Mark Whitacre, a high-ranking Archer Daniels Midland executive who in the early 1990s began telling first his superiors and then the local FBI in Decatur, Illinois, that he had gotten himself entangled in an international illegal scheme. The details change each time he tells the story. At first, Whitacre seems to argue that a Japanese business is offering bribes to ADM; later he says that ADM itself is orchestrating a price-fixing scheme. He agrees to have his home phone tapped and even to wear a surveillance wire.
The movie is written as a tongue-in-cheek thriller, albeit a confusing and directionless one, but Soderbergh — the Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven director — is back in his go-to-hell art-film mode (his last two pictures were the interminable Che and the throwaway The Girlfriend Experience).
This means Soderbergh isn’t trying to actually entertain the audience. The supposed laughs on offer are pretty much entirely in the overwrought score, the chintzy costuming, Damon’s performance, and (primarily) Soderbergh’s head. He imagines that punctuating virtually every scene with bursts of retro ain’t-that-a-gas music from composer Marvin Hamlisch and allowing (or even ordering!) Damon to play the part with stars in his eyes and the vocal intonations of an overeager high school freshman running for class president will make the audience giggle at such lines as “Didn’t these people see The Firm? Everything they did to me, they did to Tom Cruise!” Or (yes, this is essentially the same joke) “It’s like Rising Sun! It’s like the Crichton novel!”
Am I supposed to have heard of this edgy guy who is just like all the other edgy guys in Hollywierd producing movies that only professional critics have heard about, much less seen?
His fifteen minutes of fame have yet to arrive. Sorry.
anyone who can make a movie glorifying “che” cannot be an inteligent student of history. ….could not have honestly looked at his life, and then insults his victims with his trash.
I’ll take a pass on this one. Matt Damon creeps me out at the best of times. He reminds me of vivo.
http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/
another view of this story can be found here.
I can’t figure out Soderbergh. On the one hand, he makes Ocean’s 11, one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. On the other hand, virtually every other movie he has ever made is absolutely terrible (and I only say “virtually” to be nice, because I can’t think of any other good ones).
Class Clown (#5), the movie “Ocean’s 11″ was a re-make. He simply re-made a better man’s film.
Nothing he’s done deserves a minute of film time or a dime of good money.
I loved the book, a serious true crime story with a dark, dry humor based on pacing. The author takes Whitacre at face value, then leads the reader into worrying the hero may be getting carried away at the idea of being an FBI mole. By the time it is revealed the star witness is an impeachable flake, readers have to laugh at the joke being played on them as well as on the FBI. That Whitacre was embezzling from his employer is just the beginning. Unveling exactly why Whitacre had been embezzling is ROTFLMAO funny.
It sounds like Soderbergh lost focus on the need to build up to that big comedic payoff in exchange for a lot of little chuckles at the expense of middle America.
Bonnie,
Except that I tried to watch that older movie, and it was really, really bad. It was clearly just an excuse for Frank Sinatra to hang out with his buddies and clown around on Hollywood’s dime.
A better theory is that Soderbergh actually is talented, but like all other Hollywood leftists, his talent short-circuits whenever it crosses paths with his ideology.
This guy looks like the poster boy for smug leftist. How old is he? Thirteen?
Soderbergh is a talentless hack. All the Ocean movies are garbage as well. There are scores of better movies out there, especially this day in age with Netflix and high-speed internet. Don’t waste your time.
One of the few directors I can think of that is more nauseating is Tim Burton.
“Stephen Soderbergh’s film has the Che director yet again thumbing his nose at American moviegoers.”
Thanks. Had you not told me, I would never have known. That is, I guess, the price I pay for never going to a movie.
“He tells us . . . that he’s ’0014′ because he’s twice as smart as 007.”
A line that was funny the first time I heard it — back in the ’70s on a “Gilligan’s Island” re-run.
Sorry, can’t take Matt Damon seriously in anything after seeing “Team America”.