(Long Island, N.Y.) I’ll state it right up front- the worst possible sin a film can commit is to be boring. Now, I’m not saying bad- I’m saying BORING. The two don’t always go hand in hand, you see. While a just plain bad movie may draw the ire of the general movie going public, I find there are usually some (usually unintended) golden nuggets of entertainment contained within if you look closely enough. But when a movie is boring…now that’s true pain. I’d say it’s safe to say a movie qualifies as boring when more than two of the following occur:
- You find yourself struggling to stay awake, or worse, struggling to fall asleep
- You take a keen interest in probing the floor with your sneakers so as to properly identify which spots are stickier than others
- You start thinking about all the vegetables you’d rather be eating, and you hate vegetables
- You text anyone you can think of, even people you don’t know or like
- You constantly have to wake your friends so you don’t have to suffer alone
Alas, I found myself having to deal with all of the above when watching Steven Soderbergh’s latest, The Informant. A black comedy based on true events surrounding naughty corporate price-fixing scandals, The Informant had intrigued not that I’d been hoodwinked by more than one dishonest trailer in the past and grown bitter. Jaded, even. But The Informant would be different, I declared. I just had a feeling. Drat. I fell for it again.
Imagine my disappointment when The Informant (it’s actually called “The Informant!” but I’m leaving out the explanation point because it makes for odd and annoying sentence structure, at least for me) turned out to be the cure for insomnia. Literally. I’d been sleeping pretty poorly for the last few days but I had to endure repeated elbows from my friend Don throughout the first 40 minutes or so of The Informant until I finally caught my second wind. Then he conked out and I had to start elbowing him. But we’ll get into the hows and the whys of this in a minute.
The Informant is centered around a real-life international price-fixing conspiracy in the mid-1990s to artificially inflate the price of an animal feed additive called lysine. Mark Whitacre (Damon) is a successful young officer at Archer Daniels Midland (AMD), a company at the center of the conspiracy. Forced by his goody two-shoes wife to blow the whistle on the happenings at AMD, Whitacre soon finds himself a willing and eager participant in the growing case against its top executives, collecting hundreds of hours of audio and video during meetings with AMD’s competitors to fix the price of lysine. Working directly with FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula), Whitacre seems at first to be the perfect stoolie, happily spending years of his life aiding in the investigation against his bosses at AMD and their Japanese counterparts. However, his behavior eventually starts to turn bizarre and erratic, and as time goes by, it’s discovered that Whitacre himself is weaving a tangled web of lies and deception to cover his own indiscretions at AMD. Could he’s helping to take down?
The Informant had potential. I mean, gobs of it. It tells the interesting true-to-life tale of the beginnings of the world-wide movement by governments against price-fixing (a practice where rival companies secretly agree to uniformly drive up the prices of their product), a crime that was all but ignored up until that point. As a result of Mark Whitacre’s aid AMD was initially fined $100 million, the largest antitrust fine in U.S. history at the time. To date, billions of dollars of price-fixing fines have been paid by various sundry companies, representing a major modern crack-down on corporate crime. Thus, The Informant tells a tale of a significant turning point in legal history, making it ripe for an entertaining trip to the cinema. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a total bore. I know I’m going against the critical grain here, as The Informant is generating fairly positive reviews, but it takes all kinds, folks. And I’m the kind that just doesn’t get the film’s critical appeal at all.
First of all, I have to say that The Informant has an excellent lead. Matt Damon, always a solid actor (remember Good Will Hunting?), is the main reason I didn’t have to prop my eyelids open with matchsticks while watching. I’m not sure what Mark Whitacre was like in real life, but I’d bet at least $10 that Damon nailed him perfectly. I’ve always been especially impressed by actors that are willing to physically transform themselves for a role- the aforementioned weight gain, along with an off speech pattern reminiscent of a Kids In The Hall sketch really enabled Damon to lose himself in the part. As a character, Mark Whitacre is a far cry from Jason Bourne- you can tell a lot of work went into Damon’s preparation. Scott Bakula and Melanie Lynskey also turn in effective performances as FBI agent Shepard and Whitacre’s wife, respectively. Oh, and the guy that played Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) from Back to the Future is in this as well, but he didn’t bully anyone around or make them do his homework. I was bummed about that, but I guess I can’t blame him because he’s probably trying not to get typecast. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that The Informant’s cast is uniformly good.
No, the problem with The Informant isn’t with the actors, it’s with the plodding and ineffective direction. As mentioned above, the subject matter is very compelling, but the material is presented in such a bland and uninteresting fashion and the pace so grating that I wondered how and when director Steven Soderbergh (responsible for the sturdy Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13) became so hopelessly milquetoast. I’m sure The Informant was a great movie when it originally existed purely in script form, but somewhere along the way to the screen all the life was just sucked out of it. It’s a shame- instead of being enraptured by The Informant’s twists and turns, you’re just counting the minutes until it mercifully ends.
Also to The Informant’s detriment is how hard Soderbergh attempts to make it “zany” and “madcap.” The movie is filled with hokey jazz lifted straight out of a 60’s late-night comedy act and strange monologues by Whitacre that are always completely irrelevant to whatever’s happening at the moment…but it all comes across as supremely forced, as if The Informant’s desperately trying to sell you on how damn funny it is. But, aside from a few decent laughs, it’s not.
In the end, The Informant is a missed opportunity. On paper, it had it all- a good cast, a good story, a well-known director- but in the end, it produced a film far below the level of its esteemed pedigree. Still, I’d almost (and by almost I mean not quite) say it’s worth it to see Matt Damon’s performance, but if you do I suggest loading up on the caffeine beforehand, or you’re likely to snooze straight through it. Otherwise, skip it.
