'Informant!' Refreshingly Apolitical, Highly Entertaining

Mark Whitacre had a boring job as a scientist and executive at Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest food-processing companies. Trapped in small-town Illinois hell with his wife and kids after previously living with them in the capitals of Europe, he still loved to drive fast cars and pursue as much luxury as his rural life could afford, all the while reading Michael Crichton and John Grisham novels that he believed were all too realistic in their depictions of corporate and governmental intrigue and malfeasance.

Stir all those factors together with his insider knowledge that ADM was colluding with overseas food companies in one of the planet’s biggest price-fixing schemes ever, and the fact that Whitacre became both one of the FBI’s best informants ever may not have seemed all that surprising. But the fact that he also hid a highly unstable tendency to lie or leak information as well also made him one of the Feds’ most nerve-wracking and unreliable head cases ever – and it’s this dichotomy that forms the center of director Steven Soderbergh’s head-spinning and comically offbeat take on the ADM scandal, “The Informant!”

Showcasing Matt Damon in a highly amusing turn as Whitacre, the film is an entertaining oddity because it tells the story of Whitacre and international conspiracy as a comedy, while its source book – investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 book “The Informant” – is dead-serious in tone. In fact, Damon signed on for the role thinking that he was going to be delivering a dramatic performance, only to find later that Soderbergh (“Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Oceans 11, 12 and 13”) decided to start over from scratch and play off the ironies inherent in Whitacre’s double life.

The film’s supporting cast is also filled with rich surprises, headed by Joel McHale and Scott Bakula as the two main FBI agents working the case. The real revelations, though, are a string of new-school and traditionalist standup comics – ranging from Tom Papa to Patton Oswalt to Jimmy Brogan – playing a mix of the film’s funniest and most serious roles. It’s rare to see some of these comics act at all outside of their comedy-club sets, so the casting is odd and yet spot-on as everyone delivers with spot-on peformances.

While the film’s script by Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) is only truly hilarious with the occasional throwaway line, the key to its highly amusing nature is the out-of-left-field, kitschy ’60s-lounge style score by old-school composer Marvin Hamlisch (“A Chorus Line”). The score’s jaunty undertones, mixed with occasional bursts of James Bond-style dramatics, provides the perfect undertone for Whitacre’s delusional mindset as he inflates his actually boring wiretapped meetings to the level of CIA-style excitement. In one of the film’s funniest lines, he shows a friend his elaborate and supposed-to-be-secret wiretap apparatus and says he’s known as “Agent 0014 – because I’m twice as smart as James Bond.”

In reality, however, Whitacre is seen as a doofus by almost all around him. Sometimes he’s aware of it, as is the case with the ADM executives whose lack of respect for his hard work pushes him to turn against them in the first place. Yet far too often, he’s too clueless for his and the government’s own good, creating an often-stunning series of betrayals and problems for everyone involved. The end result historically is that Whitacre was regarded as a national hero by the FBI agents on the case, yet was dirty enough himself in his side deals and lies that he himself wound up with a nine-year prison sentence for fraud – a fact the film glosses over.

With two of Hollywood’s most outspoken liberals at the wheel – Soderbergh’s most recent prior film was “Che,” an epic four-hour biopic of Communist rebel Che Guevara, while Damon’s dream project is to produce a TV miniseries based on radical historian Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” – one might expect “The Informant!” to be an anti-capitalist screed. Yet the film refreshingly refrains from taking an overtly political stand, instead choosing to make what could have been a dry polemic highly entertaining.