The Informant!, Soderbergh’s Latest Inside Joke
It becomes clear in the first quarter of an hour that Whitacre is a fabulist and that nothing he says is going to add up. Yet most of the movie is spent on making this one point in various ways. Moreover, Soderbergh has not the slightest interest in actually clarifying the technical details of the various criminal cases involved; several ADM executives went to prison, although at times the movie makes it seem like Whitacre is the only one who has done anything wrong. Soderbergh is far too groovy to get into the nitty-gritty, so he tosses out specks of information as carelessly as a teen driver dropping fast-food wrappers out the window as he munches.
The entire movie gambles that we’ll enjoy Whitacre’s company for 108 minutes. We’re meant to find him weirdly fascinating as he keeps up a nonstop interior monologue, delivered by Damon in voiceover. These snippets, obviously fabricated by the screenwriter even though Whitacre is a real person who worked for ADM in the 1990s (and who later served several years in prison for embezzling), are meant to remind us that Whitacre is a flake: “I like my hands,” he declares, out of nowhere. “They’re probably my favorite piece of my body.”
In every frame, you can sense Soderbergh and Damon snickering at this pathetic blowhard and his hopeless taste. He wears inelegant suits, ugly ties, and two-tone hair styled to suggest a bird’s nest-style toupee. He tells us about information he gleaned from in-flight magazines, and boasts, when he fancies himself an undercover agent who is going to bring down ADM and be rewarded with the top spot in the company, that he’s “0014″ because he’s twice as smart as 007. The entire film is (digitally) photographed with an aggressive garishness meant to suggest, perhaps, overlit conference rooms or the anonymous grids of large corporate offices.
These are things the filmmakers assume we despise, and simply by presenting corporation men’s lives in quotation marks, as it were, Soderbergh thinks he is fashioning a comedy to an audience of refined artistes and tastemakers who wouldn’t be caught dead working in a classic middle American company that is located (for extra snark value) almost in the middle of America. Two hours of smugness and superiority do not a movie make, though.
Toward the end, as Whitacre attempts to spin yet another preposterous lie, his wife interrupts him: “You need to stop doing this to yourself.” Filmgoers whose patience has run out an hour before this point will be left asking themselves why Soderbergh and Damon feel it’s so vital to exasperate the audience in exactly the same way Whitacre has irritated everyone around him.
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”.