The Informant! (2009)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
A rising star at agri-industry giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Mark Whitacre suddenly turns whistleblower. Even as he exposes his company’s multi-national price-fixing conspiracy to the FBI, Whitacre envisions himself being hailed as a hero of the common man and handed a promotion.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced The Informant!
What critics say influenced The Informant!
(It has the same effect as the one on 1980's Airplane! ) It's a peculiar combination of a potentially big story told with deadpan blandness, with an absolute nothing of a lead character -- complete with a paunch and a bad moustache -- who imagines himself as something more.
Whitacre's tale certainly warrants an absurdist's touch, but Soderbergh and Burns get mired in the middle ground somewhere between Michael Mann 's fist-shaking, heart-pounding The Insider (likewise a whistleblower's tune) and Steven Spielberg 's jazzy, light-on-its-feet Catch Me If You Can (with a brief stopover to hang out with the Barbarians at the Gate).
To play Whitacre, the normally debonair Damon has acquired a paunch and a walrus moustache; on one level, his gleefully nerdy performance is a malicious parody of Russell Crowe's solemn turn in Michael Mann's anti-tobacco thriller The Insider (1999).
It’s like you’re getting two Russell Crowe movies for the price of one: “The Insider’’ and “A Beautiful Mind.’’
Didn't they do this story a decade ago and call it The Insider? Yes, but director Steven Soderbergh wanted The Informant! to go somewhere else down the rabbit hole of Whitacre's mystifying mind.
Ten years ago Russell Crowe appeared in a movie called “The Insider,” the true story about someone in a major corporation who decided to tell truth about the wrongdoing he had witnessed.
Instead of a nail-biter like The Insider or the pathetic tale of a corporate hit-and-run victim, such as Flash of Genius, Mark's big-business shenanigans simply peter out anticlimactically over the course of six or seven years, and that's that.
Whitacre's tale certainly warrants an absurdist's touch, but Soderbergh and Burns get mired in the middle ground somewhere between Michael Mann 's fist-shaking, heart-pounding The Insider (likewise a whistleblower's tune) and Steven Spielberg 's jazzy, light-on-its-feet Catch Me If You Can (with a brief stopover to hang out with the Barbarians at the Gate).
I'm going to tiptoe one step further into spoiler territory before backing away again: "The Informant!" is what you get if you take the plot and characters from " The Insider ," jam them into the high-style yarn-spinning of " Catch Me If You Can ," that Spielberg movie with Leonardo DiCaprio as a legendary con man, and top off with a dose of farcical espionage out of the Coen brothers' " Burn After Reading ."
It’s part Erin Brokovich or The Insider big-business malfeasance and whistleblowing, part breezy Catch Me if You Can or Burn After Reading caper comedy, with a bouncy score by Marvin Hamlisch and 1960s-esque title captions.
If you liked Leonard DiCaprio in “Catch Me If You Can”, then you might like this one.
This adaptation of a nonfiction book contains shadows of similar movies — "Catch Me If You Can," "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" — but has two aces going for it: Soderbergh's poking at the mazelike holes in American business and Damon's whirling dervish performance.
Steven Spielberg explored this dualityand the crazy hope underlying itso much more engagingly in Catch Me If You Can.