Of course, Soderbergh is too complex a filmmaker to simply play the material as broad comedy (which is what the trailers imply); rather, he tweaks it just into the realm of dark humor, but without ever losing the sense that the story he is telling is fundamentally a tragedy. It’s not an entirely successful gambit, partially because Soderbergh’s tricky tightrope walk between comedy and pathos makes the film feel hamstrung at times when it could cut loose. The result is that you may leave the theater somewhat confused, or at least ambivalent about how you feel about what you’ve just seen, which I suspect is precisely what Soderbergh wanted (and you have to respect his willingness to buck the easy route of playing it straight by using humor and irony to underline the fundamentally absurd nature of the true-life events).

The story’s ostensible hero and ultimate goat is Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a biochemist with a Ph.D. from Cornell who, at the age of 32, was the youngest divisional president at the massive agribusiness conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). In the early 1990s, he also became the highest ranking corporate executive to work directly with the FBI as a whistleblower, steadily feeding them information in the form of tape-recordings and videos of ADM executives meeting in various hotel rooms with their Japanese, Korean, and Canadian competitors to fix the international prices for lysine, an amino acid added to animal feed. The reason for Whitacre turning turncoat were strange, given that he was pulling down hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and lived in a large house on a ranch with a stable full of horses and a garage full of sports cars. Why risk it all? Perhaps it was because his good-hearted wife (Melanie Lynskey) pushed him to, or perhaps he just wanted to do the right thing, or perhaps he had delusions of grandeur that the FBI bust would oust ADM’s top brass, leaving him a clear path to the top of the executive hierarchy. Or maybe he was just mentally and emotionally unstable.

Figuring Whitacre out is really what The Informant! is all about. The suspense of the wiretapping and other spy antics that he used to feed the FBI information is just the framework for what turns out to be a fascinating, compelling, and utterly frustrating character study of a man full of contradictions, confusion, and lies within lies within lies. He appears to be a decent father and husband, and when he approaches FBI agents Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Bob Herndon (Joel McHale), he genuinely seems to be doing the right thing for its own sake. But, as the story unfolds, we begin to see that there is significantly more to the man than first appears, which ultimately causes everything to crash down on his own personal revenge of the nerd.

In his best performance since The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Matt Damon disappears into Whitacre’s well-fed physical softness and internal twistiness, the latter of which is amusingly conveyed via earnest voice-over narration suggesting that Whitacre is not always quite there. While his voice-over sometimes comments on what is happening on screen, more often than not it reveals both his deluded inner fantasies (he constantly compares his own dilemma to John Grisham and Michael Crichton novels) and the randomness of his thinking (his thoughts drift to questions like how polar bears know to cover their black noses in order to blend in with the snow). Damon packed on 30 pounds for the role, and his meatier body and face make his eyes seem squinty and dishonest, which is contrasted with his square glasses and a particularly bad rug. He gives Whitacre a natural affability, and you want to like him, but at the same time he has an underlying sense of pathetic desperation and self-delusions--essentially the same barely hidden fragility that Damon used so well to make Tom Ripley’s murderousness tragic rather than simply evil. Some of Whitacre’s antics are funny, and some of them are sad, and some of them are infuriating, which is what keeps the film intriguing. It’s simply impossible to guess what he will do next and, more importantly, why.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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