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Review

The Informant! – Movie Review

Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Script by Scott Z. Burns based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald.
Starring Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale and Melanie Lynskey.

Steven Soderbergh is adept at conning audiences for their own amusement while rewarding them if they pay close attention. This is easy to do in a movie like his Ocean’s Eleven remake which was all style and cleverness. It’s much more difficult in a movie based on actual events. But he succeeds admirably in The Informant!

It’s 1992 and Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is an up and coming biochemical turned executive for food additive corporation Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur Illinois. He approaches the FBI with information about an international conspiracy to fix the price of lysine, a food additive used to fatten food animals. FBI Agents Brian Shepherd (Bakula) and Robert Herndon (McHale) put a wire on Whitacre to help them gain evidence of the price fixing. As time passes and the evidence mounts up, the agents begin to realise that Whitacre is an erratic and unreliable informant and that what they’re learning about ADM’s price fixing may be less important than what they learn about Whitacre himself.

I’m beginning to suspect that Matt Damon is angling for a career as a character actor. As Whitacre, he’s pudgy, sports an undernoirished moustache and wears a wig that looks like the belly fur of a wallaby. But he’s convincing, touching and at times bewildering as Whitacre. The casting is full of easter eggs for movie buffs. Soderbergh has surrounded Damon with an array of comic actors in serious roles and cameos by people we haven’t seen in movies for way too long.. Watch closely and you’ll find blasts from the past like The Smothers Brothers, Candy Clark, Clancy Brown, Frank Welker and Thomas F. Wilson (Biff Tannen in Back To The Future) rubbing elbows with more recent funnymen like Patton Oswalt, Joel McHale (from The Soup) Scott Adsit and Paul F. Tompkins.

I also like the slow reveal of this film. The way it leads you in one direction and then gradually everything you’ve seen before, from Whitacre’s trivia-filled, self absorbed voice-over narration to the subtle, fretful reactions of his wife Ginger, (played touchingly by New Zealand actress Melanie Lynskey) abruptly take on new relevance and meaning. The style and manner of this film are old school. The Nagra reel to reel tape recorder in the title sequence and the playfully amusing score by Marvin Hamlisch, are deliberately retro. The Informant! is one for real movie buffs or those of us who like a movie to surprise us.

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About The Author

Terry Frost

My name is Terry Frost. I strongly believe that popular cinema was ruined by George Lucas' first Star Wars movie which dumbed down the expectations of movie-goers to an infantile level. That's why I created Paleo-Cinema Podcast to look at movies before Star Wars. Those days when heroes had chest hair, car stunts were real and nobody said “gratuitous” before the word nudity.

http://paleo-cinema.blogspot.com

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Article Information

Posted: Sunday, December 20th, 2009
Author: Terry Frost
Filed Under: Film, Review

Tags: Joel McHale, Kurt Eichenwald, Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Bakula, Scott Z. Burns, Steven Soderbergh, The Informant!

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