17) The Informant!

The Informant! (2009)

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey

The Informant! was a film I was really interested in when I first saw the trailers for it mid last year but it just came and went from cinemas here quite quickly and with very little fanfare. I guess it just shows that even with a star as bankable as Matt Damon you still need the big marketing dollars behind a film to get it onto people's radar.

Mark Whitacre is a vice president for lysine developing company ADM. He loves his job. But when he finds himself being forced to participate in illegal price fixing he takes this information to the FBI, who convince him to act as an informant. However, as the investigation continues, just how reliable a source Mark Whitacre can be considered starts to come into question.

This is a very clever and funny film and is really well written. Matt Damon has a really big load to carry in this film. Not only is he the sole big name in the cast, with the supporting cast being made up of faces better known from the small screen than the big one, his character is also the key to making this film work. If you can't buy his performance the film simply won't work. However he holds everything together with a really strong comic performance in a role which is very un-Matt Damon-like (he sheds his chiseled Jason Bourne figure to do the Russell Crowe for this one and piles on a few extra kgs).

The stand out feature of this film is the hilarious narration from Mark Whitacre. This narration is presented in the form of a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue. Different events or things he sees will trigger a thought, which we will often hear over the top of the on screen dialogue, beautifully demonstrating the way Mark's mind wanders in and out of focus. These monologues cover everything from sushi to polar bears, the texture of avocado to his pet topic, corn.

Marvin Hamlisch's score has rightfully seen him nominated for a number of best original score awards (Golden Globes, Broadcast Film Critics Association but unfortunately no Oscar nod). In a slightly more subtle way than the narration the score also takes the viewer into the mind of Mark Whitacre. It has a comical lightness to it (even using a kazoo at one point) which beautifully illustrates the innocent ignorance of Whitacre, but the score changes to a brassy James Bond-esque feel when he is performing his undercover duties as a spy (He calls himself 0014 because he's "twice as smart at 007").

This movie is simply brilliant for the first hour, it is funny, clever and very engaging. Unfortunately, though, it starts to drag a bit from there. In the second half the focus of the story changes somewhat (I won't explain quite how so as not to ruin the film) and as a result it starts to get a bit messy and loses some of it's charm.