‘The Informant!’ 4K Blu-ray (review)

Warner Bros

Until I saw The Informant!, all I knew about lysine was that it’s an amino acid, there’s a lot of it in chickens, and the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were bio-engineered not to produce it so that they’d die if they somehow managed to escape Isla Nublar.

Thanks to Steven Soderbergh’s movie, I now know that in the early 1990s, right about the time Jurassic Park came out, there was a major conspiracy to inflate the price of lysine, which is actually used to feed chickens and not dinosaurs. The culprit was Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the “supermarket to the world” conglomerate that used to sponsor NPR and PBS before it ran onto hard financial shoals.

It’s not the Lufthansa Heist, there’s no dead mobsters in freezer trucks, but it’s what we’ve got.

The Informant!—beware of movie titles bearing exclamation points—was not originally supposed to be a comedy.

Based on New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s highly praised nonfiction book, it was optioned by Steven Soderbergh for a true-life investigative thriller along the lines of Michael Mann’s The Insider or his own Erin Brockovich. It revolved around Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who leaked the price-fixing plot to the FBI, gathered hundreds of hours of recorded evidence for the investigation, and was all set to become the government’s star witness… until ADM discovered that he’d embezzled somewhere around nine million dollars from his employers.

Turns out Whitacre’s whole plan was to send the top ADM leadership to prison so that he could take control of the company. And he’d have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling forensic accountants.

I’m guessing it was at this point that Soderbergh realized there was no way he could do this as a straight drama, because a) the main character’s master plan was too weird, and b) who the hell cares about lysine price-fixing scandals?

This was how The Informant! got a dark comedy rewrite, sprouted its exclamation point, and relieved Matt Damon of the burden of learning to look and sound like the real Mark Whitacre. Instead, he could put on a big Ned Flanders pornstache, do that Matt-Damon thing where he always looks like he’s about to lick his upper lip, and wing it.

From the moment the jazzy, 1970s-ish soundtrack steals in—by Marvin freaking Hamlisch, no less—we get the sense that we’re in some kind of retro-land. Which is a false start, considering that the movie actually takes place between 1992 and 1997: not exactly retro for a movie released in 2009.

As we meet Mark Whitacre, he’s telling his bosses that a Japanese competitor has slipped a virus into ADM’s lysine feedstock. If true, this is absolutely a case for the FBI. Spoiler: it’s not true. Whitacre cooked up the whole story just so that he’d have an excuse to approach two FBI agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) about the price-fixing scheme. This is the first of many deceptions that will be peeled away before the movie ends.

It wouldn’t be a Steven Soderbergh picture if it didn’t give us a little long-con deception, not to mention unreliable narration.

While Eichenwald’s book leads with the news that Mark Whitacre was an embezzler, the movie leaks the truth out in a series of oh-by-the-way reveals. Whitacre passes off every admission as if he was just correcting minor details and not admitting to serious fraud.

In the scene where he confesses his crimes to the FBI, he starts by asking if they’d have a problem with a guy letting his daughter drive his company car. When they say no, he asks what if the car was a jet, and what if the jet was a kickback, and what if the kickback was half a million dollars, and what if the guy was him. He uses the word “hypothetical” three times.

Movie Whitacre doesn’t just get caught lying to the FBI: he gets caught lying to the audience.

He voice-overs the whole story, and it takes a while to realize that the details of his narration keep shifting. The first time he admits to embezzling, it’s a half million dollars. By the end of the movie, he’s copped to eleven million, and there’s no way of knowing if even that number is accurate. At one point he tells the audience how his parents died and he was adopted by rich people, musing about how this changed his fate. His parents later show up to ask what the hell Mark is talking about.

The Informant! can be a lot of fun, but it’s an annoying kind of fun.

I don’t know if the real Mark Whitacre is like this, but his onscreen version is prone to odd tangents. It’s like even he knows his story isn’t interesting enough to hold our attention, so he keeps jumping topics. At one point he observes that polar bears disguise themselves from their prey by covering their black noses, which leads him to wonder how polar bears know their noses are black.

Later, as he deletes incriminating evidence from his cell phone, he thinks about how birds learn to avoid poisonous butterflies from their distinctive markings, while these other butterflies have the same markings but no poison: “They’re just flying around looking dangerous, getting by on their looks.”

What does this have to do with the price of lysine? Nothing and everything, maybe, who knows.

He’s a liar who studies nature in order to improve his camouflage. Maybe he’s telling us that if you’ve got the right disguise, you don’t actually need to be dangerous. Given Matt Damon’s chirpy performance, that makes a little sense: he acts like a safe person pretending to be dangerous, but really he’s a dangerous person pretending to be safe. Everyone from his FBI contacts to his lawyers, even his loyal wife (the ever-goofy, ever-fun Melanie Lynskey), is worse for having trusted Mark Whitacre; and yet they can’t get it into their heads that he’s just not worth protecting. He’s the bad kind of butterfly.

I would say that all of this builds up to a fascinating portrait of a pathological liar, except that most of his flea-jumping speeches lead nowhere. He’ll interrupt a semi-important conversation with a German price-fixer to observe that the German word for pen is “Kugelschreiber.” During what is supposed to be a big moment, arriving in Japan to catch his bosses committing federal crimes on tape, he starts talking about the Tokyo vending machines that sell used panties. Halfway through the movie, he comes up with the idea for a TV show about a guy who calls home and he, the guy, answers the phone: he doesn’t seem aware that this setup was already part of a movie called Schizopolis directed by, um, Steven Soderbergh. I think the filmmakers were going for knowing and clued-in; instead, it all comes off like a flex. They must have paid huge for the dialogue pass.

This was what made me realize that The Informant! is an imposter comedy, the same way that Mark Whitacre was an imposter informant.

It throws off all the signals that go with comedy—the retro-vibey scene bumpers and musical stings, the fast patter and quick cuts—but the dialogue never quite blossoms into punch lines. I note that it was adapted by the same guy who wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, Contagion, and Side Effects. He appears to be Soderbergh’s favorite screenwriter. He does dark, he does psychological, he does Matt Damon in car chases. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t do funny. Maybe he wasn’t going for funny. Maybe it’s all part of the long con Soderbergh’s playing. Who knows how deep this hedge maze goes.

It is possible to make great movies about great liars—Orson Welles’s F For Fake, Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass, and Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax (about Clifford Irving’s fake Howard Hughes bio) all come to mind.

If The Informant! is not a great movie, it’s most likely because Mark Whitacre is not a great liar: just a sleazy corporate drone trying a power play that never had a lysine-pumped chicken’s chance of succeeding. Most of the movies I just mentioned are about the art of the lie. Welles weaves an infinite regression of fables within fables. The Hoax sets up an intricate façade that nearly suckers the audience, only to collapse when Howard Hughes himself emerges from hiding. Shattered Glass works because Stephen Glass is so adept at playing on people’s sympathies.

Mark Whitacre has none of that working for him. His lies are so flat and sociopathic that the joke always seems to be on the person naïve enough to believe them, which gets old fast. When his FBI handlers ask why he didn’t tell them about the embezzling, he blandly replies that they wouldn’t have helped him if he’d told the truth. That’s about as clever as Whitacre gets.

I’ve known a few pathological liars, and I must say they are more like Mark Whitacre than they are like Clifford Irving or Stephen Glass.

One of them was a publicist who made up fake movie reviews for terrible films. Another one stole my mom’s medications. These people couldn’t be bothered to tell entertaining or artful lies. They just made things up because it got them what they wanted. If I’m going to watch somebody do that onscreen for two hours, I either need them to be really good liars or I need to know why the truth mattered.

The Informant! doesn’t give us either. What it gives us are inflated lysine prices. That may be enough for hard-hitting New York Times investigative journalism, but it’s not enough to earn a laugh.

Surely the director of Ocean’s Eleven, one of the great long-con heist films of modern cinema, could do better than chicken feed.

Extras include commentary, additional scenes, and trailer.