Review

Review Date: 20-September-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Informant! (2009)

The exclamation point in the title of The Informant! denotes that it is an over-the-top affair and should not be taken seriously. This indication echoes the movie's trailer, which made it out to be a riotous and conspicuous farce. Yet the first hour or so of The Informant! is only vaguely humorous and therefore distinctly off-putting. Based on a real incident from the 1990s, it tells how Mark Whitacre, an executive at an agri-chemical company, collaborated with the FBI to expose illegal price-fixing within the international corn trade. The soundtrack gamely attempts to assure the viewer that Whitacre is hilarious, but he is not; played by Matt Damon, he is just an average, opportunistic, middle-aged business drone with slightly more conscience than his colleagues.

Watching Whitacre engage in espionage under the supervision of his government handlers (Scott Bakula, Joel McHale) holds some forensic interest, but not much. At the point you decide the movie is a case file inexplicably masquerading as a comedy, the mood and plot shift. Absurdity enters the picture, albeit of a darkly twisted kind. The Informant! becomes funny in the same way it would be funny if an ax-murderer was identified by the finger he accidentally cut off and left at a crime scene.

That is to say, to enjoy the punchline of the film you must enjoy the wryness of another's depravity and the fact that evil sometimes effects good. Tapping into his experience as The Talented Mr. Ripley, Damon is a wonder to behold as the investigation shifts from the company's wrongdoing to his own. Whitacre is such a liar that at the very end you cannot be sure whether all his crimes are known, and you sympathize with the FBI agents and lawyers whose jaws drop at every new revelation. How many Whitacres exist in the world, self-absorbed centers of their own little cosmoses who drift without moral compass and grab at any way to shield their transgressions? How often are others protected from them simply because their goal happens to depend on financial or social scheming instead of violence? If the initial chapters of The Informant! show how undercover work is done, the latter chapters show how humanity is warped. A viewer's sense of humor, not to mention tolerance, must determine whether either of these is entertaining.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.