The Informant!

Movies that use an exclamation point in their title are usually about average people pulling off amazing things, like the soccer movie Goal!, or something so far over-the-top as to be laughable, like Airplane! The Informant!, director Steven Soderbergh’s new film, is both at the same time. That’s very unusual and may qualify for an exclamation point all in itself.

The Informant! is based on the true story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), President of Archer Daniels Midland’s BioProducts Division, one of the profit centers of a $62 billion food processing behemoth. Basically, it’s a big-time corporate scam dressed up as a farce, with a twist that would bring tears to the eyes of Gordon Gekko, the “Greed is good” guy in Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street.

Whitacre is the film’s hero and its goat, a truly odd duck. A former biochemist in his late 30’s, he is likable and smart as Damon plays him, a seemingly harmless energizer bunny of a man eager to please all those he’ll meet on his way to the tippity top of the food chain. The Eagle Scout in him turns whistleblower for the FBI when he finds himself as a player in an ADM inspired price-fixing conspiracy. But this scout also owns a loopy Machiavellian Merit Badge, and that’s the reason he rats out his buddies, not ethics. He sees it as an easy way to clear out the competition for the top spot at ADM! And while all this is going on, right under the nose of the FBI, he decides to skim some scam for himself.

Way too strange to be true. Whitacre reminds me of John Nash (Russell Crowe) in “A Beautiful Mind,” a self-deluded/ chemically imbalanced man clever enough to make up stories that make his delusions seem real to himself and his peers. Even though we movie watchers eventually figure out what he’s up to, we never really get much of a sense of what Whitacre is feeling about anything. There doesn’t appear to be an emotional there there. For all we know, Whitacre was a genetically engineered executive grown in a secret ADM lab and dropped into a suit, a poster boy for the Science Geeks Association.

Much of the movie is about Whitacre wearing a wire and walking one. He shuttles back and forth between meeting with ADM’s top dogs and meeting with his FBI handlers, always the same earnest person, always plausible even when spinning stories from thin air. Soderbergh documents this dance in an almost documentary style, using very tight, grainy shots and flat lightning. It felt like the director had taken a cinematic Alka Seltzer after all that eye candy in his boffo box office films, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13.

The talented Mr. Damon gained 30 pounds for this role, shedding his normally lean and hungry look to become stocky and stiff-jointed. He doesn’t walk so much as float like a Macy’s parade balloon, head always slightly ahead of his body, his legs trailing along behind. I found it amazing that the man who played the sleek, lethal secret agent Jason Bourne in the Bourne Identity, was also this porked up little guy with the aviator glasses and a milquetoast mustache.

Although Damon’s Whitacre is not as fully realized as Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk or Meryl Streep’s Julia Childs, it’s still a great performance and worth seeing. We can only hope that the intelligence, agility and vulnerability of Damon’s riveting performance in “Good Will Hunting” finds more fertile scripts in the future. Has there ever been an actor that can look so clean and bright no matter how deep the do-do?

The ADM guys running the scam are all overweight lightweights, jocular, dull and cold-blooded like Tony Soprano’s posse. But Soderbergh denies his scammers the frosted hair and goofy nicknames, the reverence for Mother, which makes movie thugs seem ridiculous and less scary. He strips them down to the bare wiring, these hallow, stuffed men panting after the Grail.

Marvin Hamlisch’s Tin Pan Alleyesque musical score does its best to prod us into seeing the Keystone Cops nuttiness of this scam and Whitacre’s even nuttier efforts to exploit it. But it just isn’t funny. Worse, it doesn’t seem sad either. It felt like Erin Brockovitch (2000), Soderbergh’s first big box office success, with all the anger and moral outrage washed out.

I left the theater feeling dazed and confused. But that is how I often feel when thinking about credit-default swaps, Enron, junk bonds, et.al. How do people like Whitacre and the price fixers get away with their scams for so long? And why have we taxpayers continued to give ADM billions in annual subsidies even after the company has been convicted of rigging the game? Isn’t anyone watching the store?

The Informant! lets us feel what it’s like to be inside the erratic, disturbed heart pulsing at the center of ADM’s world, the same world we live in too. Maybe the exclamation point in the title is a cry for help.