Spilling the beans (or corn) about corporate greed
By Joyce Koor | Posted: 23 November 2009 1045 hrs

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RATING:

SINGAPORE: Do not set your sights on an outrageous comedy despite the exclamation mark in the title of "The Informant!" or you will be disappointed. Rather than laughing out loud, most of the jokes will leave you to chuckle under your breath.

Director Steven Soderbergh (of the "Ocean's" trilogy and "Erin Brokovich") recounts an entertaining expose of corporate malfeasance broadly based on a true story of the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in US history.

Adapted from "The Informant: A True Story" written by New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, this financial satire is subversively funny with the amateurish silliness of Mark Whitacre which is what delivers the laughs.

Beefing up 30 pounds, Matt Damon plays corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, a biochemist and an executive who, in the early 1990s started cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spill the beans (or corn in this case) on his agri-processing Illinois firm in a global price-fixing scheme.

Thinking that he is some kind of de facto James Bond of the corporate world ("0014, because (he is) twice as smart as 007"), Whitacre starts to supply the FBI with close to 200 secret tapes of boardroom meetings that would later implicate his fellow employees from Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the largest multinational food-processors in the world where "corn goes in one end and money comes out the other".

Beneath Whitacre's feathered toupee, Dilbert ties and spectacles the size of diving masks, the Cornell graduate antihero of this reality-based farce nails the role of a delusional individual who envisions himself being hailed as a hero of common man and handed a promotion.

With every revelation he offers, he withholds a vital piece of information from both the viewers and his FBI contacts played by Scott Bakula with his perpetual deadpan grimace and Joel McHale as fellow agent.

The FBI agents believe they have stumbled on a goldmine of information, and they have. But the story comes in dribs and drabs and you have a feeling that there is something he is not telling you. And you are right.

It is not long before we begin to question why he is spilling the beans to the FBI. Does he have an agenda of his own?

As psychologically volatile as the Dow Jones indicators, the misaligned interior monologues of distracted observations in Whitacre's head provide numerous streams of exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies which start to make him a constant source of frustration for the FBI.

Now, the problem is to try to figure out where the truth ends and where the lies begin.

The complicated plot unravels under the intense surveillance of a group of attorneys, law enforcement and corporate honchos as Whitacre's web of deceit spins out of control and is discovered to be hard at work on some elaborate - and highly illegal - schemes of his own.

This film about greed, corruption and other capitalist vices you can think of was the most explosive case of corporate crime in a decade, pre-Madoff era, of course.

Largely set in generic mid-Western office spaces, Soderbergh's decision to shoot the film with a look that blows out white light causes it to be evocative of 1970s-era cinema. Had not the 1990s date in smiley yellow novelty typography been supplied, I would have been fooled.

Together with monotonous but hilarious narrative voiceovers, Damon does a goofily-good job as a lumpy, baffling paradox, so does Melanie Lynskey as Ginger Whitracre, her husband’s biggest supporter.

Oscar-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch's whimsical score is a memory throwback to the overly-cheery daytime quiz shows and it might undermine the expectations of those hoping for a weightier take on subjects of white-collar crime and the effects of bipolar disorder. Still, its wackiness compliments Whitracre’s psychosis.

In Soderberg's world of comic possibilities, "The Informant!" manages to stay consistent as a comedy with a tinge of a grave thrust due to the subject matter at hand.

- CNA