Your Bowl of Cereal Is a Crime Scene: The Informant! Review

It is probably bad form to start a review with a cliche, but here goes nothing. The truth is stranger than fiction. Seriously. This is especially the case in Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant!, which dramatizes the story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-level executive to ever turn whistle-blower for the FBI. As the byzantine, darkly hilarious, and utterly astounding plot of the film plays out onscreen, The Informant! earns that exclamation point in the title.

While at the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Whitacre tipped the government off to an international price fixing scheme between some the largest manufacturers of lysine. Lysine is an amino acid that humans need but cannot produce on their own. Thus it is added to lots of food. And when I mean lots of food, I mean lots of food. Detailing such a conspiracy may not sound so exciting given that this film does not play out like a thriller along the lines of The Insider or All the President’s Men. The ways in which Whitacre helps the FBI and subsequent revelations surrounding the price-fixing scheme surface, however, make this film one of the funniest and most infuriating whistle-blower films to date. It is funny because Soderbergh, working from Scott Z. Burns’ adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s book about the case, tells the story with an incredibly droll and wry tone. Some of the funniest humor does not come from overreactions, but from people trying to remain measured while events that merit wild reactions take place around them. It is infuriating because when ADM and their co-conspirators agreed to raise the price of lysine together, nearly every person around the world was hurt in their wallet when they bought food. The Insider told a terrible story of how tobacco companies lied about the effects their products had on consumers, but people by and large can avoid smoking if they choose. People cannot avoid eating.

Matt Damon plays Whitacre with a level of sincerity bordering on naive. While he is actively undermining his company’s illegal activity — activity that he helped create, by the way — he hopes that his actions will actually ingratiate himself to the company’s executives and they will put him in charge once all the corrupt people are out. Whitacre is shown to be a genius who understands both the science and business sides of ADM. His mind races nearly every moment. He can be in the middle of a complex business meeting with someone from Europe, Asia, or South America, and as they discuss intricate calculations and numbers, Whitacre is also telling the audience through humorous voiceovers about what he learned about polar bears that week. Sometimes these voiceovers seem like non-sequiteurs and completely unrelated to the action onscreen, but as the film moves on, we see that their use is intentional and revelatory. Damon’s choice to play Whitacre so straight and on the surface is the absolutely right one. He is the type of person we meet and we believe what we see is what we get. The thing is, even Whitacre believes this about himself, or wants to believe this about himself. He wants to believe that he is essentially a good person doing the right thing despite his involvement in creating the price-fixing scheme in the first place. His assistance of the FBI — he is called one of the best informants in history — does not come about as a way to rectify his guilty conscience. Whitacre truly wants to be a hero. He wants to be recognized as a hero. Whitacre draws inspiration from Tom Cruise’s character in The Firm. I will leave the plot discussion at that since the story is an onion with layers of incredible and hilarious disclosures.

Soderbergh’s detached and wry sense of humor comes through not only in the staging and pacing of the scenes, but in the overall look of the film. Though events in The Informant! take place in the 1990’s the film itself looks like something from the 1970’s. Soderbergh casts everything in a golden glow and the titles of places and dates appear on screen look like they came from a cop show like The Streets of San Francisco or Hawaii Five-0. These visual elements may feel a bit disjointed until we realize that this is how Whitacre sees himself. He wants to be like one of those cops unearthing a terrible underground conspiracy and bringing justice to the world.

Soderbergh is a fantastic director of actors. I don’t think I have seen a bad performance in one of his films — even when he casts amateurs like in Bubble. The same goes here. I have already praised Damon’s work enough. I should also mention Melanie Lynskey as Whitacre’s terrifically supportive wife, Ginger. She is as sincere as Whitacre himself, though Ginger actually has a moral rudder. It is Ginger who threatens to blow the whistle on ADM first. Also of note are Joel McHale and Scott Bakula (you read that right) as the FBI agents assigned to Whitacre to coach and cajole him to give them more evidence. They are proficient and professional and humorously exasperated by Whitacre’s inability to keep his mouth shut.

The Informant! is the type of film whose plot just keeps getting better and better as it becomes more complex. Different story tellers would buckle under the weight of all the technicalities and details of this plot, but Soderbergh and his team manage to show the audience what happens without making it boring, overly complex, or overly simple. This is a movie for adults, not because there is much in the way of questionable material, but because the humor is so subtle and the story demands people pay attention.