"The Informant!" He's wearing a wire, but that ain't half of it.

The Informant is Steven Soderbergh's newest film starring Matt Damon, and is based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, a man who sought to expose a global conspiracy of price fixing by multinational corporations...but for all the wrong reasons. Indeed it's one of those stranger-than-fiction stories that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief and muttering ai yai yai (sic?)

So here's the setup: Mark Whitacre is an upper management biochemist at the ADM corporation, which makes additives in various food products. When the factory he oversees has trouble meeting demand, he fabricates to his superiors an insidious plot to subvert ADM by its Japanese competitor, involving extortion, viruses etc. This lie prompts an investigation by the FBI, which threatens to uncover an even greater plot: ADM in cahoots with its competitors to fix prices of their additives worldwide and rip off a planet of consumers! Rather than be caught on the wrong side of this potential disaster, Whitacre turns FBI informant and snitches the entire scheme, with the delusion that he will ascend to ADM CEO once the Fed cleans house.

Got all that? Maybe not. Suffice it to say that Whitacre, through the course of the film, weaves such a tangled web of bullshit that he finds himself in deeper and deeper trouble, with everyone else simply pleading for the truth. As his lying becomes seemingly pathologic, the film evolves from comedy to tragedy.

Now Soderbergh's most known for his Ocean's Eleven movies, Sex, Lies and Videotape and Oscar-nominated Traffic and Erin Brockavich. He certainly has made some great movies; I think Traffic was just awesome, and his lesser known film The Limey, was also very cool. He recently made Che: Part I and II, which didn't get a lot of attention but were, from my understanding, quite historically accurate, if a bit overly deferential. In The Informant!, though, Soderbergh doesn't score a lot of style points. The strength of the movie is the story itself, and doesn't need a lot of flair, and in fact the Muzak soundtrack and cheeky opening disclaimer were a bit annoying.

There's one particular editing technique Soderbergh used in The Limey, Out of Sight and Erin Brockavich that I thought was really neat, transcendent even. He films two people conversing, then cuts to a scene with the two people together, silent, with the sound from the previous conversation still playing. It allows us to see two people together both silent and conversing simultaneously, which in reality, is impossible if you think about it. Here's a youtube link that shows what I'm talking about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uxY8Wsygpw

If this movie doesn't sound like your bit of whimsy, you might at least listen to the This American Life podcast "The Fix is In", which basically tells the entire story (but without Matt Damon in a god-awful tie and mustache).

Coming up next time: Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. Can't wait!!