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In a decade that has been a miserable slump for comedy, Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! is a welcome exception to the rule. Based on a stranger-than-fiction price-fixing case against agri-giant ADM, The Informant! lacks an oldies soundtrack, a Jewish male lead, adolescent longing, fat sidekicks, scat humor, testicular trauma, barfing, or the humorous stylings of Seth Rogen--all elements that I thought were now essential in any comedy distributed by a major studio. Instead it has Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, a bright but extraordinarily banal ADM executive who becomes a high level government informant (inadvertantly, the movie hints, when a scheme to extort money from his employer brings in the FBI). Over the course of the investigation, the Amway-esque Whitacre slowly melts down while trying to conceal his own criminal activity under increasingly implausible cover stories.
The Informant!'s subject matter and structure make it a tougher sell, and the anemic trailer broadcasts as wacky farce what is really a slow burn--the pleasure in this movie is found in the layers of deadpan earnestness that make up Mark Whitacre's psyche, and in the build-up of low key absurdity. Damon and Soderbergh balance the dullness and verisimilitude of the corporate environment against the just slightly erratic nature of Whitacre. This kind of balance requires immense confidence in the material. It would be easy in almost every scene to go for a cheap laugh, to heighten the absurdity, or to take the bumbling to a physical level, but Damon and Soderbergh never do these things. As a result you don't laugh at jokes, exactly, but at Damon's perfect character acting, and the payoff is worth it.
Damon shares with pal George Clooney a gift for comedy that is too seldom taken advantage of. Both men are, as dramatic actors, undercut by their own looks--Clooney looks like the guy you cast as a leading man in the movie within a movie, and Damon is too baby-faced to ever look truly dangerous or adult (he is better in movies like Rounders that trade off a sense of callow). Clooney is perhaps hopeless--he seems to feel that he is best in comedies in which he is allowed to out-smug everyone in the room, whereas his good looks would play better as either a heavy or a moron--but Damon shows some promise. Although as transformations go, gaining 30 pounds and taping on a moustache are not the stuff of legend, Damon adopts the restrained physicality of a corporate executive where a lesser actor would have chosen more buffoonery and scenery chewing (a lesser actor like, say, the Steve Martin of the last 20 years). As you might have guessed, I find Damon's approach much funnier--the funniest part about Whitacre is how completely normal he seems as he is doing something absurd, such as cooperating with the FBI while actively embezzling from his employer.
Although it's not an intrinsic part of the humor, the movie makes the effort to capture the setting's early 90s period. The casting and cast are very good--acknowledging that everyone but Whitacre is a straight man--and its fun to see actors like Tom Wilson and Clancy Brown pop up even briefly. Although the movie stands no chance against a four quadrant monstrosity like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it far exceeds its niche trappings and deserves a long shelf life on video.
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