Truth, lies and audiotape
Melora Koepke
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In the can: Damon imparts important info to the outside world.
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Matt Damon, in Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, is a complicated, comedic whistleblower
At the beginning of Oscar season, you might expect a movie like The Informant!, about corporate corruption and its ill effects on one real-life company man, Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon. And you might think that with such a film, director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic), might be courting awards with the deadly seriousness attendant to the topic at hand and the star power attached to it. But Soderbergh has never been one to cater to expectations, and The Informant! is hardly a conventional whistleblower drama. Rather, it's a send-up of the more earnest, triumph-of-the-human-spirit-type movies we're used to in that genre. In fact, The Informant! isn't a searing corporate thriller so much as a slightly sarcastic, wry send-up of conventional morality that seems suited to its catchy '70s-style soundtrack, composed by the great Marvin Hamlisch (The Sting, The Way We Were), his first movie score in over a decade.
However, Damon, who gained 30 pounds to play Whitacre ("Doughy in every way," as per Soderbergh's directions), wryly insisted at a press day last week that he had taken the role with an Oscar in mind. Along with the extra weight, he also dons a prosthetic nose, cheek inserts, a '70s cop moustache and a toupée in order to pull of the role of Whitacre who, as the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in American history, was a hero to FBI investigators until they realized that, besides being their mole, was also embezzling
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funds from his company to the tune of $9-million. Or was it $11-million?No one is really sure, since the real-life Whitacre, an agri-business engineer for the corporate giant ADM, turned out to be a traitor not only to his company, but to the authorities who outfitted him with a wire in order to gain information on his employer's price-fixing scheme. Not only does the wire collect the desired information, but also exposes Whitacre's own embezzlements (as well as a bipolar pathological liar) instead of an Erin Brockovich-calibre American hero.
Still, says Soderbergh, the changeable nature of truth is very much the story of The Informant!, and fits within the thematic continuum he began with Truth, Lies and Videotape.
"He's the good guy and the bad guy at the same time," said Soderbergh, who began thinking about Whitacre soon after directing another film about a character caught in the gears of a profit-focused corporate regime. "I absolutely thought about Erin, and this being a mirror to [that film]."
So is Whitacre a villain, a hero or something in the middle? Perhaps an antihero worthy of the economic climate of 2009, where taking what you can before getting caught seems to be the name of the game in some corporate circles?
"As I get older, I realize two opposing ideas can actually both be true," says Soderbergh. "I didn't think he was worthy of condemnation, but it's obvious he had a very complicated relationship with the truth."
Damon, on the other hand, may have a more straightforward appreciation for Whitacre, since playing him in a movie allowed the actor to cultivate a relationship with carbs.
"I talked to [Robert] De Niro before I did it and he had obviously piled on the pounds really famously for Raging Bull, putting on 60 pounds," said Damon. "I asked him about it and he said, 'Well, the first 15 pounds is really fun and then you have to go to work after that.' It was true except I found the 30 pounds to be really fun."
The Informant!
I caught the advanced screening of this movie at the AMC and it's pretty brilliant. Matt Damon's character is crazy enough that you pick up on it early on but not overly done. 4/5!
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Gillian Sze
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