Todd McCarthy/Variety likes it, but doesn't sound like much of an awards-type film:

The Informant!
A Warner Bros. release presented in association with Participant Media and Groundswell Prods. of a Section Eight-Jaffe/Braunstein Enterprise production. Produced by Michael Jaffe, Howard Braunstein, Kurt Eichenwald, Gregory Jacobs, Jennifer Fox. Executive producers, George Clooney, Jeff Skoll, Michael London. Co-producer, Michael Polaire. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Screenplay, Scott Z. Burns, based on the book “The Informant (A True Story)” by Kurt Eichenwald.

Mark Whitacre - Matt Damon
FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard - Scott Bakula
FBI Special Agent Bob Herndon - Joel McHale
Ginger Whitacre - Melanie Lynskey
Terry Wilson - Rick Overton
Mick Andreas - Tom Papa
Mark Cheviron - Tom Wilson
Aubrey Daniel - Clancy Brown
James Epstein - Tony Hale
Robin Mann - Ann Cusack
FBI Special Agent Dean Paisley - Allan Havey
Liz Taylor - Rusty Schwimmer



By TODD MCCARTHY

The wacky little brother of “Erin Brockovich,” “The Informant!” goofs around lightheartedly while still doing some justice to the true-life story of a zealous but wildly delusional corporate whistle-blower. A larky outing for director Steven Soderbergh after the somber rigors of “Che” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” the pic showcases an excellent performance by a chubbed-out Matt Damon as a Midwestern executive who’s so smart he’s dumb. Amusingly eccentric rather than outright funny, this Warner Bros. release will have to rely mostly on Damon for its B.O., which looks to be modest.
Having already done a major film that called out big business with a straight face, Soderbergh returns to the same arena with a ****ed eyebrow and lots of jokers up his sleeve. The exclamation point on the title and the jaunty, old-fashioned score by Marvin Hamlisch serve as immediate tipoffs as to the film’s hyperreal intentions, which will inevitably put some viewers off, but for others will provide an amusing, original angle on the sort of story that’s almost always done with an earnest sense of self-importance. In some ways, you could call “The Informant!” Soderbergh’s Richard Lester movie, in light of his devotion to the Britain-based American director of cutting, serious comedies.

Packed out with 30 extra pounds, a moustache, artfully done hairpiece and dorky glasses, Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a gung-ho VP at a Decatur, Ill.-based agribusiness firm, Archer Daniels Midland, where “corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other.” A career biochemist entirely behind the promotion of such food additives as lysine, Mark unleashes a staggering corporate and legal tsunami when he tells his boss he’s detected a mole in the ranks that’s allowing a Japanese competitor to mess with their lysine manufacturing.

Instead of meeting a $10 million extortion demand, ADM calls in the FBI, which taps the home phone of the cooperative Mark. At the urging of his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), Mark goes further, privately informing agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) of a massive international price-fixing scheme involving lysine. Suddenly excited -- in a boyish secret-agent sort of way -- at the prospect of going undercover, Mark agrees to wear a wire at work to provide the evidence the government needs to make its case, and he circles the globe trying to get executives to blurt out what is seldom addressed explicitly.

The lynchpin and most inspired stroke of the entire movie is the voiceover narration screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) has cooked up for Mark. The almost constant flow of Mark’s interior thoughts crucially signals the man’s active fantasy life, as well as his intelligence, imagination, humor and oddness. Sometimes the private commentary relates to onscreen events, but more often it’s borderline stream-of-consciousness, a wonderful conceit that still only partially reveals the protagonist, but suggests that part of him is out of touch not only with reality but with himself.

Labeling himself Agent 0014, “because I’m twice as smart as James Bond,” Mark also is obsessed with Michael Crichton novels, particularly “Rising Sun,” for its prediction of a Japanese takeover of world business. Other casual details also speak volumes, such as his huge collection of expensive European sports cars.

At a certain point, Mark’s story begins to simultaneously unravel and become more stupendous than ever, driving his FBI contacts batty -- well, there used to be price-fixing but there’s not anymore; there never was a mole in the first place; once the miscreants at ADM are cleared out, Mark will be the last man standing and he’ll run the company. Over the course of 2½ years, Mark and the FBI get plenty of incriminating stuff on tape, but that’s only half the story, as Mark’s machinations become wildly more grandiose.

Soderbergh doesn’t play any of this for outright laughs but has cast quite a few comic actors in supporting roles -- even the Smothers Brothers pop up in cameos, Tom as the ADMchairman, Dick as a judge -- and lets the comedy emerge from the head-spinning swirl of events and mental charades. Filming in actual locations helpfully grounds the flights of the fabulist protag -- even the Whitacre home at the time was used -- and the corporate offices, unstylish suits and assorted bland hotels and offices exude total authenticity. Soderbergh’s lensing alter ego, Peter Andrews, again gets excellent results with the Red camera.

Damon is in very sharp form in his fifth film with Soderbergh. The thesp makes Mark brazen in his conviction that he’s always right and unremorseful about his fabrications, but never in a superior, hubristic manner; as is slowly revealed, he’s always been able to rationalize any alteration of reality that served his purposes, and even when faced with his own deviousness, he never doubts that, “I’m the good guy in all this.”

One weak spot is the portrayal of his marriage. Having known Mark since youth, Ginger sticks with him no matter what. But she has to assume a greater complicity than is gleaned from the way Mark brushes aside her inquiries into developments, and a keener awareness on her part of what goes on in his strange head would have been welcome.

With: Tom Smothers, Dick Smothers.

Camera (Technicolor, HD), Peter Andrews; editor, Stephen Mirrione; music, Marvin Hamlisch; production designer, Doug Meerdink; art directors, David E. Scott, William Hunter; set designers, Dawn Brown Manser, Jane Wuu; set decorator, Dan Clancy; costume designer, Shoshana Rubin; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Dennis Towns; supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer, Larry Blake; assistant director, Gregory Jacobs; casting, Carmen Cuba. Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Sept. 1, 2009. (In Venice Film Festival -- noncompeting; Toronto Film Festival -- Special Presentations.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 108 MIN.

Mixed H'wood Rep review

The Informant! -- Film Review
By Kirk Honeycutt, September 07, 2009 01:57 ET

Bottom Line: A comedy about corporate fraud, malfeasance and a mental disorder that never quite succeeds as a comedy.
That exclamation point in "The Informant!" is a tipoff to what director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns have in mind.

Without that punctuation, this tale of corporate skullduggery, embezzlement, wiretaps, a whistle-blower and mental illness would be either a sweaty-palm thriller or a gritty character study about matters of conscience in corporate America. But that exclamation point changes everything. It's a comedy! And Matt Damon is playing a Tom Ripley without any smarts -- or at least without any instinct for self-preservation.

Perhaps the only way to tell the bizarre yet (mostly) true account of Mark Whitacre is as a comedy. It's somewhat akin to Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can," about a fabulous con artist who fakes out so many people that even he can't sort out truth from fiction. This is tricky stuff: a comedy about things that aren't really funny. With the right tone, you can maybe pull this off, but Soderbergh chooses to throw all subtlety aside.

Marvin Hamlisch's jaunty score, like something out of a 1960s Doris Day movie, and the protagonist's inner monologue, rambling the length of the movie and throwing off extremely weird fragments from a disordered mind, all but beg an audience to laugh. And, here and there, no doubt they will.

But how many people are going to care terribly about a protagonist, a compulsive liar, who keeps pulling the rug out from under himself? The movie insists that all this is hilarious, but it feels like desperate pleading. Which lies are you supposed to laugh at exactly?

Burns' script is based on the book "Informant" -- notice the lack of an exclamation point -- by Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter. It centers on a complex individual, a top executive at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, who helped the FBI expose price fixing at that company in the 1990s. Eventually, he also was prosecuted for embazzling huge amounts of money.

In the movie, a running monologue by Whitacre makes it clear this is not a normal guy. He obsesses over trivia while ignoring major problems. And he plays a blame game in which his errors in judgment can always be laid off on someone else.

His view of the world is skewered and, yes, at times funny. The youngest divisional president in the company's history, pressure falls heavily on him when a lab problem puts the division into the red. It proves much easier to blame corporate sabotage than to admit failure.

That brings the FBI into his world, and soon his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), demands he tell the agents about the crimes ADM forces him to commit. And soon, his FBI handlers, agents Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale), are asking him to "wear a wire." Just like in the movies.

Suddenly, the mousy corporate suit sees himself in a white hat. He's a spy! He calls himself agent 0014 since he's "twice as smart as 007."

Soderbergh's whimsical direction conditions a viewer not to trust this protagonist. So you feel no surprise that the sabotage allegation proves false. Then again, some wild tales prove to be true: The ADM vice chair (Tom Papa) and other suits do get into surreptitiously recorded conversations with foreign competitors about price fixing. Whitacre only has to coach them a little bit to say the right words.

Then the fictional house of cards slowly tumbles around the FBI, bewildered DOJ lawyers and his own attorneys. Each lie leads to a more elaborate lie. The movie hints that much of this erratic behavior is explained by a bipolar disorder, but there is never a clear diagnosis.

Damon's master liar is no smooth customer. You can sense the sweat on his lips. His answers come too fast, and his hands and feet are in constant motion. It's a body trying to keep up with an overactive mind.

Everyone else in the movie mostly reacts in bewilderment. Except for Lynskey's Ginger, the one calm person amid chaos. Is she on to her husband or is she clueless? That answer never comes.

Soderbergh, acting as his own cinematographer under the name Peter Andrews, is in love with the HD digital camera Red Cam, so light levels are low and natural. Which is somewhat at odds with the comic mode of the film. But then again, the whole film, a comedy about crime and mental illness, seems at war with itself.

This from InContention.com:

SHORT TAKE: “The Informant!” (***)
Posted by Guy Lodge · 5:00 am · September 7th, 2009

Venice Film Festival

That jaunty exclamation mark handily sets the tone for Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” a flip, frisky entertainment that may well represent the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation.

Of course, the trailer already (and unavoidably) pulled the covers from the film’s biggest trick: that writer Scott Z. Burns (”The Bourne Ultimatum”) has reimagined Kurt Eichenwald’s dense non-fiction thriller about a mid-1990s agribusiness price-fixing scandal as a rapid-fire corporate comedy of errors, like “The Insider” as filtered through the dry whimsy of Preston Sturges.

It’s a double or nothing strategy that merrily pays off, offering rich comic dividends as the true-life nature of the material elevates its absurdity, but — far more surprisingly — not sacrificing the sense of consequence and complexity in the events at hand.

Critically touching on both the antisocial nature of corporate American greed and the inefficiency of the government in curbing it, the film actually makes an elegant companion piece to its its festival compatriot, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” (reviewed here).

The perspective Soderbergh presents here, however, is a lot less judgmental or clear-cut than Moore’s, thanks in no small part to the guiding presence of Matt Damon, whose subtle, malleable characterization here keeps framing and reframing the film’s own ethical stance.

Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a folksy, seemingly guileless Cornell grad and up-and-comer at agricultural behemoth ADM, with whose illegal price-fixing of food additive lysine he is complicit, until his aggrieved wife (an affecting Melanie Lynskey) urges him to turn whistleblower for the FBI. So begin several years of eager — if not particularly adept — duplicity on Whitacre’s part, but just as the FBI close in the company, Whitacre’s personal web of business indiscretions begins to unravel.

The brilliance of Damon’s performance – and, consequently, the pleasure of the film – lies in the fact that Whitacre is by turn a lot smarter and a lot dumber than people take him for.

We never quite gauge the reliability of his narration until the final reel; not unlike his otherwise wholly different turn in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” he reveals the psychological cracks in the makeup of the American everyman so incrementally that you hardly notice until it’s too late. Aided by a deadpan comic fluidity the actor has never controlled so comfortably, it’s the finest work of his career.

Soderbergh, meanwhile, matches Damon’s playfulness by channelling the knockabout tone of socially aware 1970s comedies like “The Candidate,” right down to details like the lurid opening credits and a cheerfully antiquated score (his first for a feature in 13 years) from Marvin Hamlisch.

The hyper-self-reflexive trappings can grow a claustrophobic over the course of an entire feature, and the storytelling lags a little at both ends — this is a film that could have benefitted from clocking in at a crisp 90 minutes. But Burns’ busy, persistently witty flow of dialogue (most amusing of all in the stream-of-consciousness voiceover of Damon’s interior thoughts) generally distracts us from such structural quibbles.

Quite what the legions of readers who made Eichenwald’s exposé a bestseller make of the film remains to be seen, but no matter: the most significant achievement of “The Informant!” — its quicksilver lead performance aside — lies in revealing more than one way to tell a story

I just have this feeling that this film won't get any nominations past the Golden Globes... Maybe Damon, but we will see. He has Invictus... he will most likely get his nod there.

A very positive review from David Denby in THE NEW YORKER...

In Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” Matt Damon plays a corporate whistle-blower who almost swallows the whistle. Mark Whitacre (Damon) seems the epitome of Midwestern square. He wears a hairpiece that he must imagine makes him look virile—an overabundant pompadour. Damon gained thirty pounds for the role, and he’s paunchy and round-faced, with a mustache and steel-rimmed glasses. This man is the hero, or perhaps the antihero, of a true story, as reported by Kurt Eichenwald in his 2000 book of the same title (although unadorned by exclamation point). The movie opens in 1992, when Whitacre is the young president of the bio-products division at the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. He appears to be outraged that A.D.M. is fixing prices with its Japanese competitors for lysine—an amino acid that goes into the corn-based foods that fill the aisles of American supermarkets. At dinner, he stares at his corn-fed chicken and pumped-up shrimp in disgust. Does he feel guilty about what he’s doing to the American diet? About the inflation of prices? He says so, but he’s in on the fix, and the F.B.I., which has been tapping his telephone, is puzzled by him. In any case, Whitacre, naïvely excited, agrees to wear a wire to meetings with his superiors and colleagues. He turns into a foolish risk-taker, a kind of electrified dork who narrates into a tape recorder a stunningly undramatic entrance into the corporate headquarters, in Decatur, Illinois. He even fiddles with the balky machine while company executives sit all around him. He thinks that he’s invulnerable, like his idol, Tom Cruise, in “The Firm.” Somehow, no one at A.D.M. catches on to him, and he gets results. But, by degrees, almost everything he says begins to sound false. One lie encases another, and another. After five years, the Justice Department, having received hundreds of Whitacre’s tapes, finds itself committed to a major price-fixing case against A.D.M., based on incriminating information sneaked to it by a man less reliable than a carnival barker. The government is stuck with him, and so are we, since we’ve earlier paid him respect and credit.

“The Informant!” is a return to form for Soderbergh, who couldn’t seem to put anything resembling an emotional charge into his recent films—the interminable, depressive “Che,” with Benicio Del Toro staring mournfully into the jungle, and the inert “The Girlfriend Experience,” in which the porn actress Sasha Grey was so wrapped in egotism that she forgot to give a performance. This time, Soderbergh is in full control, and his star is on fire. Usually chary of words, Damon here is as voluble as a travelling salesman at a hotel bar, and he holds nothing back, never distancing himself from Whitacre’s eager, schmucky side, which, given Damon’s natural charm, is almost endearing, at first. The screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, trying to shed light on Whitacre’s inner life, creates antic voice-over monologues for him. In the midst of an ordinary task, Whitacre will suddenly, and without cause, take off into bizarrely detailed ruminations—most strangely, one about the inappropriateness of Japanese men in suits buying used girls’ panties on the street. Highly inappropriate, he insists. He seems like a moral fellow with vagrant thoughts and judgments—a little crazy, perhaps, but, then, who doesn’t have intricate flights of fancy or indignation while standing at a checkout line or walking across a parking lot? We get the sense of an indiscriminate intellectual curiosity that can’t be contained by the routines of the workday.

When Whitacre is revealed as a liar, we’re shocked, and Soderbergh, moving swiftly and surely through short scenes, keeps the style ambiguous—lodged somewhere between thriller and farce. This is a full-scale production, with locations all over the globe, yet it’s also an aggressively perverse joke. Soderbergh gets as far away as possible from the earnest, anguished tone of Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” in which Russell Crowe gave an angry performance as a tobacco executive who, having spilled the goods on his company, fears for his family’s safety. By contrast, nothing in “The Informant!” is quite straight. Many of the actors (including Tom Wilson, Joel McHale, and Tom Papa) are standup comics, and they give their lines slightly ironic inflections—a pause, a smile, a tic—that knock the scenes off kilter, or, at least, away from melodrama.

Lysine and price-fixing are the MacGuffins here; they’re not really what the movie is about. “The Informant!” turns out to be a comedy devoted to a series of conundrums. Among many other things, why in the world does Whitacre get exercised about price-fixing when he’s a man of dubious honesty himself? After each of his whoppers is exposed, he wins our trust again—we want to believe in him—then promptly loses it once more. By the end, Soderbergh’s movie subverts common belief far more effectively than some of the fantasy movies knocking around this summer. It’s a vertiginous experience that grows increasingly hilarious, and the joke is on us.

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A negative review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE

(review also covers the documentary "The Most Dangerous Man in America" which the critic likes)...

Two films depict wildly disparate whistle-blowers: Steven Soderbergh’s true-ish comedy The Informant! and Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. What a contrast: a limp burlesque and a straight-ahead, enthralling story of moral courage.

The former, based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald, plays like a pale, depopulated Burn After Reading with a fatted Matt Damon doing a Halloween number—dark hair helmet, big glasses, thick mustache. He plays Mark Whitacre, who exposed a price-fixing conspiracy at Archer Daniels Midland but turned out to be a major head case. Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns are utterly uninterested in corporate misbehavior and its ramifications, so the agribusiness giant comes off as a rather convivial enterprise. They home in on the freak show, presenting Whitacre as the wacked-out soul of corporate America—a man who sees vacant land and dreams of outlet stores, food courts. This is yet another of Soderbergh’s “exercises in style,” which means he has one big idea and sticks to it. He makes the space shallow and ugly (faces are bathed in orange) and adds groovy sixties titles and Marvin Hamlisch music. The Informant! does raise a fascinating question: How can humans so compartmentalize their psyches? But Whitacre has no stature—he’s just a nut. Steven Spielberg explored this duality—and the crazy hope underlying it—so much more engagingly in Catch Me If You Can.

The Most Dangerous Man in America also centers on an insider who attempted, in vain, to reconcile his career and his conscience. But this story changed the world. I’m ashamed to admit I knew so little about Ellsberg, a marine who studied decision-making under duress, fought the Cold War fight against Stalinist dictatorships, then traveled from Santa Monica, California, and the Rand Corporation to the Mekong Delta. There he saw firsthand that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, made the case to his superiors, and watched in shock as they lied their asses off. The more he studied the history of Southeast Asia, the more he saw that all the presidents lied: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and finally Nixon, who campaigned on a platform of stopping the war while in private vowing to hammer “this ****-ass little country.” Narrated by Ellsberg, the movie offers one revelatory interview after another mixed with reenactments (animated) that have fun with the caper-movie aspect and build real suspense. So many people risked their livelihoods to put the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers out there—although its most tangible result was the creation of Nixon’s plumbers unit. We have not celebrated Daniel Ellsberg enough. Let’s begin.

When it comes to awards I'm betting that this film is DOA.

A positive review from Richard Corliss in TIME...

Like presidential campaigners hopscotching from New York to California in the last week before the election, some movie stars and directors spend their days presenting their films at the big movie showcases — first in Venice, then a few days later here at the Toronto International Film Festival. The idea is to sell their new works to the European and North American markets, and maybe get a whisper of Oscar buzz. Among this year's frequent flyers are Werner Herzog, in Venice with his Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans stars Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, and Michael Moore, who brought along his Capitalism: A Love Story star, Michael Moore. George Clooney is a familiar figure at both festivals, and in Venice this year he shared red-carpet photo ops with his Ocean's Eleven (and Twelve and Thirteen) buddy, Matt Damon.

Tonight the Ocean's amigos are in different parts of Toronto: Clooney with The Men Who Stare at Goats at the Ryerson, Damon with The Informant! in a Gala showing at Roy Thomson Hall. Both pictures are kind-of thrillers and sort-of comedies that are more or less based on semi-non-fiction books about spy-case events that, in some form or other, may have occurred. (We'll get to Goats later this weekend, in tandem with a second Clooney film, Up in the Air.) Clooney always puts on a suave show, but tonight at TIFF, Damon has the posher venue and the better movie.

In the early '90s, Mark Whitacre (Damon) is president of the bio-chemicals division of the agro-giant Archer Daniels Midland. When the FBI launches an investigation into possible corporate espionage at ADM, Whitacre volunteers the information that his bosses are colluding with other companies in fixing the price of the amino-acid lysine, used to make the polyunsaturated corn oil in so many food-related products. "Basically, everyone is a victim of corporate crime before they finish breakfast," Whitacre tells an FBI agent (Scott Bakula), who says, "That's not a business meeting, that's a crime scene." Whitacre would become the highest-ranking businessman ever to blow the whistle on his own company, and ADM would pay $500 million in penalties.

Didn't they do this story a decade ago and call it The Insider? Yes, but director Steven Soderbergh wanted The Informant! to go somewhere else — down the rabbit hole of Whitacre's mystifying mind. He seems the sunniest symbol of corporate America and middle America: smart, pleasant, undemonstrative, with a supportive wife (Melanie Lynskey) and two kids. But we get the earliest glimpses of Mark's gift for fooling people, and perhaps himself, in the movie's voiceover, in which Mark wanders blithely into logical cul-de-sacs and exotic trivia: In Japan, he notes, there are vending machine where men buy the used undergarments of schoolgirls. What does that say about the Japanese? Or about Mark, for fixating on it?

The whole movie is Mark's brain scan. It's shot and acted in a bland style that, you only eventually realize, is deeply askew, and darkly, corrosively satirical. The measured voices and pastel palette — every location, whether an ADM office, a local restaurant or Whitacre's home, has the impersonal cheeriness of motel-room décor — are reminiscent of some '70s game show produced by Chuck Barris, complete with a perky score by Marvin Hamlisch. Then Whitacre's story vortexes into deeper chicanery, and possible derangement; and The Informant! reveals itself as a cousin to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the movie (directed by Clooney) that posited Barris as an assassin in the employ of the CIA. The key to The Informant!'s subversive agenda is in that exclamation point: it points you to responding by saying, "Ha!" or Huh?"

"Huh?," as in: What game, exactly, is Whitacre playing? Whose side is he on? How much of what he, or the film, says is true? Those questions, and the complexity of what may pass an answers, juice up the entertainment value of The Informant! The movie begins with a printed statement that, while much of the action is fact-based, certain characters and situations have been massaged for dramatic effect. This warning ends with a cheeky "So there," as if the filmmakers are sticking their tongue out at the gullibility of the ADM execs, the FBI agents, possibly Whitacre and, for sure, the audience.

The film was written by Scott Z. Burns, whose two most prominent credits — as a producer of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and one of the scripters on Damon's hit thriller The Bourne Ultimatum — hint at The Informant!'s mix of crusader fact and secret-agent fiction, though neither of those films has this one's devious agenda. In the movie business, Soderbergh is himself something of a double agent. Over the past decade, five of the features he's directed — the three Ocean's films, Traffic and Erin Brockovich — have grossed more than $100 million domestic, while seven others, including The Good German (with Clooney) and Che, have earned less than $5 million. His movies are either super-Hollywood or defiantly, sometimes suicidally, anti-Hollywood.

On the box-office chart, The Informant! may end up closer to the non-starters. Its lunacy is too deadpan, and its denouement too drawn out, to appeal to those who liked the Bourne movies, or, for that matter, the Gore. But it's worth seeing, and a salutary achievement. Hollywood is an industry that mostly ignores workplace life and the impact of corporations on what we eat and how we live. And on the rare occasions when it touches on these issues, it looks to turn them into morality plays with easily recognizable heroes and villains (as Erin Brockovich did). The Informant! says that people who do good or ill have complex motives for their actions, and that not everyone is knowable, instantly or ever. If we leave the movie wondering who its Mark Whitacre is, that will be the right response: not a "Huh?" but a muted "Aha."

A negative review from Robert Wilonsky in THE VILLAGE VOICE...

As evidenced by The Informant!, it's a hell of a tricky thing turning real-life pulp into floss sugar. The story of Archer Daniels Midland biochemist-exec-turned-crooked-federal-snitch Mark Whitacre is a tragicomedy. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent five years trailing the bipolar ****-up, and his 2000 book, The Informant, is so densely, richly packed with gut-wrenching what-the-what? revelations that it's easy to speed through the 600-plus pages thinking it's a novel. Which, for some reason, wasn't good enough for writer Scott Z. Burns and director Steven Soderbergh, who frame their screen adaptation, The Informant!, between quotation marks so they can giggle from a safe distance.

Their conceit is made clear with the film-opening caveat, which warns that, yes, while this may be a true story about Mark Whitacre—played here by Matt Damon, beneath 30 pounds of pudge and a toupee—some names have been changed and some events have been collapsed, "so there." And then the irony hits fast and hard: the score by Marvin Hamlisch, offering a 1970s best-of; the flat, blindingly washed-out look shot in HD but borrowed from an episode of Dallas; the stunt casting of comics (Patton Oswalt, The Soup's Joel McHale, Paul F. Tompkins, the Smothers Brothers, Tony Hale, Rick Overton, Allan Havey) in dead-serious roles; title cards whose font went out of style with shag carpet and, um, Marvin Hamlisch. Soderbergh's sure got a lot of gimmicks—the man's working hard.

Unlike the director's usual organic efforts—in which great style never results in overstylized—The Informant! feels overamped from start to shrugging finish. (And this is from someone who defends Ocean's Twelve as a Marx Brothers film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.) The filmmakers have painted a 1990s story with a 1970s palette, and the tone clashes with the setting, like plaid on paisley.

This is a shame, because buried somewhere inside the bag of tricks is a thrilling, heartbreaking, breathtaking, darkly comic tale about a deluded hustler and crackpot liar who decided to bring down one of the world's most powerful companies just to cover his greed, his ambition, and his own sorry ass. Whitacre was a whistleblower, absolutely, but also far from a hero.

In 1992, Whitacre was a golden boy at ADM with a big problem: His attempts to create an amino acid by feeding corn to microbes were failing, thanks to a virus in the vats. And so he blamed his troubles on corporate sabotage—from Japan, like in Michael Crichton's Rising Sun, he'd often say—and wound up with the FBI tapping his home phone. Which led to his confession to the FBI that ADM officials were conspiring with competitors on a price-fixing scheme. Which led to his wearing a wire for three years. Which led to ADM's discovery that he'd been embezzling millions. Which led to prison. For everyone.

The outline of that tale remains—in Soderbergh's version, Whitacre is still the rising star who goes supernova all by his lonesome. But there's no drama in his rise and fall, no tension, no nothing except the nonsensical narration that Whitacre provides with a rambling inner monologue ("Guys in suits buying girls' used panties . . .") that grows increasingly paranoid the more in trouble he becomes.

Truth is, Whitacre is fortunate to get off with the filmmakers and Damon's glib, flabby, pasted-on-smile caricature. Same goes for the ADM higher-ups, often reduced to bit parts here. The other characters, chief among them FBI Special Agents Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula, beneath a thickly lacquered helmet of hair) and Robert Herndon (McHale), also get short shrift; it'll take those who haven't read the book forever to figure out who's who, or why it's worth the bother. Screenwriter Burns hasn't condensed the book so much as cut and paste from Eichenwald's tome a few pages here and there; it's less a narrative than a highlights reel. (During a preview screening, audience members were overheard asking neighbors, "Now, who's that guy—an FBI agent or an Archer Daniels executive?")

Whitacre's tale certainly warrants an absurdist's touch, but Soderbergh and Burns get mired in the middle ground somewhere between Michael Mann's fist-shaking, heart-pounding The Insider (likewise a whistleblower's tune) and Steven Spielberg's jazzy, light-on-its-feet Catch Me If You Can (with a brief stopover to hang out with the Barbarians at the Gate). What they wound up with: The Untalented, Bespectacled, Pudgy, Toupee-Wearing, Prevaricating, Kinda Nutty Mr. Whitacre. Now, who's conning whom?

A grade B review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

Punctuation promises comedy in The Informant! as if the title subject is a cartoon secret agent — maybe Agent 86 in Get Smart. But he's not. The whistle-blower worthy of an exclamation point in this groovy-looking, chuckle-baiting, fact-based movie from protean director Steven Soderbergh is Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a biochemist and well-placed executive at the agri-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in Decatur, Ill. It's the early 1990s. The company man is helping expose ADM's alleged global price-fixing activities to the FBI, cooperating with the feds long enough to gather invaluable evidence. But what Whitacre doesn't confide to his FBI handlers, and what his wheat-colored jackets, Dilbert ties, and weakling mustache hide, at least at first, is that this inside source is not completely trustworthy. Damon, fattened up to fit his boxy suits, wears Whitacre's slack demeanor beautifully. The star — who has quietly and steadily turned into a great Everyman actor — is in nimble control as he reveals his character's deep crazies.

Soderbergh's amused study of the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in U.S. history is adapted from The Informant: A True Story, an amazing, deeply reported book by New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald. That book told the story without editorial eye-rolling. But somewhere between Eichenwald's journalistic attention 
 to detail and the bubbly, dialogue-
besotted script by The Bourne Ultimatum's Scott Z. Burns, Soderbergh has 
 chosen to apply an attitude of arch whoopee, a greasy veneer of mirth over what is, no joke, a serious mess of malfeasance and mental instability. It's tempting to laugh, but what's 
 the joke: Whitacre? ADM? The FBI? 
 The fashion trends of Decatur? Smarty condescension lurks behind the suburban bushes.

Had a '90s date and place card not been supplied, I would have remained in an honest muddle about the era depicted on screen. And since Whitacre is subliminally likened to bumbling, fictional Maxwell Smart, that's probably as the filmmaker intended. The artistic choice is reinforced by a '70s-era 
 Laugh-In aesthetic seen in everything from the smiley yellow novelty 
 typography of the opening credits to the fancy rubber-chicken music served up in heaps of horns and whistles by essence-of-'70s composer Marvin Hamlisch. Sock it to me.

Playing it straight and letting his Sam-
Donaldson-meets-Spock hairdo suggest 
 otherwise, Scott Bakula makes an appealing FBI agent with a deadpan grimace just this side — or maybe it's the other side — of Dragnet's Joe Friday. Comedian Joel McHale from E!'s The Soup plays the fellow agent who stares with big round eyes while his partner squints at Whitacre's successive leakages of truth/lie/ truth/lie. The always wonderful, huggable 
 Melanie Lynskey, who stole the show in Away We Go, does more great wifely work as Ginger Whitacre, her husband's biggest booster. A valued subset of Soderbergh's audience is sure to dig iconic hipster comic brothers Tom and Dick Smothers in small roles. In fact, the wily pair would fit right in with an Ocean's Whatever cast of coolios, enjoying some retro-style ensemble fun, regardless of whether the audience does.

Soderbergh is as smart, stylish, and 
 attentive a filmmaker as they come. And there are moments in The Informant! when I can 
 almost be convinced that the tonal feints he 
 establishes at the intersection of joke and no-joke are seriously, thoughtfully meant to replicate the misaligned synapses in Whitacre's own head. But if that's the intention, Soderbergh 
 ultimately made the choice to abandon interesting, dispassionate empathy for the more quick-fix payoff of amusement. As Whitacre goes through his days, Damon recites interior monologues of distracted observation in voice-overs meant to demonstrate how his character's unusual brain works. In The Informant!, that brain — screwy and yet capable of doing important undercover work — free-associates like Ellen DeGeneres on a swing through 
 Walmart. Cute, but as even Agent 86 would say in Get Smart: Missed it by that much. B

A **** review from Roger Ebert...

Mark Whitacre was the highest-ranking executive in U.S. history to blow the whistle in a case of corporate fraud. He ended up with a prison sentence three times longer than any of the criminal executives he exposed. To be sure, there was the detail of the $9 million that he embezzled along the way for his personal use. What we discover toward the end of “The Informant!” may help explain that theft, although he apparently didn't want that used in his defense.

Whitacre, persuasively played by Matt Damon in Steven Soderbergh's new thriller, was a top vice president of Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, one of the 50 largest corporations in America. Sprawling at the edge of the small central Illinois city, it is surrounded by miles of soybean fields, and if you buy Japanese tofu at Whole Foods, it probably passed through ADM on its way to Japan. It's also involved in several other crops, produces sweeteners, sells ethanol.

Whitacre knew that ADM and its competitors were engaged in global price-fixing that cost consumers billions. This largess was passed on invisibly to executives and stockholders, yet created a surprisingly small footprint in central Illinois, Yes, executives lived in very nice houses (Soderbergh shot in Whitacre's mansion in tiny Moweaqua, Ill.) but they were low-profile, compared to Manhattan high-rollers, and ate at the local restaurants just like ordinary folks.

The story unfolds as Whitacre is put under pressure to discover the source of contamination, possibly industrial sabotage, in one of ADM's operations. He engages in unofficial conversations with key competitors overseas and thinks he may be onto something. Then FBI agents from Decatur swoop down as part of an espionage probe. He clears himself, but as the agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) are leaving, he calls after them.

He has something he wants to say. They're blindsided. He tells them ADM has been fixing prices for years, that he has been involved, that he has details and wants to clear his conscience. His wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) helped him arrive at the decision to do the right thing.

The FBI recruits him as an informant, taps phones, teaches him to wear a wire and even videotapes price-fixing meetings, building an airtight case. Eventually three officials, including vice chairman Michael Andreas, son of the founder, were found guilty; the company was fined $100 million and paid another $400 million in a class action lawsuit.

If only it were that simple, “The Informant!” might have been a corporate thriller like Michael Mann's “The Insider” (1999), with Russell Crowe as a whistle blower in the tobacco industry. But during the investigation, Whitacre reveals himself as a man of bewildering contradictions. Who would think to attempt an embezzlement and phony check-cashing scheme while literally working under the noses and at the side of FBI accountants? What was the full story of the industrial espionage he halted? Did he really expect that by exposing those above him, it would clear the way for him, one of the key price-fixers, to take command of the company?

What did Whitacre think about anything? Not even his wife was sure. All is explained, sort of, in “The Informant!,” and as Soderbergh lovingly peels away veil after veil of deception, the film develops into an unexpected human comedy. Not that any of the characters are laughing.

“The Informant!” is fascinating in the way it reveals two levels of events, not always visible to each other or to the audience. A second viewing would be rewarding, knowing what we find out. Matt Damon's performance is deceptively bland. Whitacre comes from a world of true-blue Downstate people, without affectations, surrounded by some of the richest farmland in the world. His determination to wear the wire leads to situations where discovery seems inevitable, but he's seemingly so feckless that suspicion seems misplaced. What he's up to, is in some ways, so very simple. Even if it has the FBI guys banging their heads against the wall.

Mark Whitacre, released a little early after FBI agents called him “an American hero,” is now an executive in a high-tech start-up in California and still married to Ginger. Looking back on his adventure, he recently told his hometown paper, the Decatur Herald and Review, “It's like I was two people. I assume that's why they chose Matt Damon for the movie, because he plays those roles that have such psychological intensity. In the ‘Bourne' movies, he doesn't even know who he is.”

A *** out of **** review from Claudia Puig in USA TODAY...

People magazine may just strip Matt Damon of his "sexiest man alive" title once they catch sight of the actor in the offbeat film The Informant!.

Portly — Damon packed on 30 pounds for the role — and sporting a ridiculous mustache, dorky wire-framed glasses and an unmoving helmet of hair, he's almost unrecognizable in the role of Mark Whitacre, a corporate whistle-blower who is not what he seems.

Damon is superb as a demonically smart guy who comes across as rather dim. The Informant! is an odd, satirical comedy that director Steven Soderbergh has infused with a jaunty tone, in contrast to the serious subject matter. Its story of corporate malfeasance and corruption as well as individual greed couldn't be more timely, given the antics of bailed-out Wall Street companies and powerhouse banks.

The dark comedy is based on the real-life much-publicized story of the highest-ranking corporate whistle-blower in American history.

It's the early 1990s and Whitacre is a top exec at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), an agri-industry conglomerate engaging in an industry-wide practice of price-fixing. Why would Whitacre sabotage his golden-boy status by revealing his company's wrongdoings? At first he seems like an inept but heroic guy, fessing up to the FBI and exposing his company's illegal acts because it's the right thing to do.

Soon, it becomes clear that his motives are more ulterior than pure of heart. The FBI agents assigned to the case (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) find that Whitacre's account of events shifts more easily than his toupee in a strong breeze. Is Whitacre a knight in shining armor, a compulsive liar, playing secret agent or plagued by mental illness? Or is he all of the above?

With his earnest demeanor and straightforward delivery, Damon convincingly obfuscates Whitacre's motives. We don't question his veracity as much as try to muddle through it. A big part of the fun is piecing together the puzzle that is Whitacre.

In a strange but fascinating touch, Damon voices his inner monologue. Often, his thoughts — an inane stream of consciousness — seem wholly unrelated to what's going on around him, which adds an intriguing absurdist quality to an already quirky tale. We come to realize Whitacre is the least reliable narrator in an already slippery setting.

Soderbergh takes a deadly serious news story and amplifies and colors it to the point of outrageousness. The results aren't always consistent, but they are undeniably compelling.

A ***1/2 out of **** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...

Can you twist facts into a comic pretzel and still come out on the salty side of truth? To judge by The Informant! — the nonfiction story of a wack-job corporate whistle-blower played by Matt Damon in a mesmerizing mind**** of a performance — you sure as hell can. Director Steven Soderbergh takes the same biopic route he traveled a decade ago in Erin Brockovich, only this time with a ****eyed compass and a fit of giggles. There is devilish fun in this look into 1990s white-collar crime. But the jokes are the kind you choke on.

This is Damon like you've never seen him, and he goes for broke. With hair on his upper lip and a rug on his head, Damon porked up 30 pounds to walk the walk of Mark Whitacre, a four-eyed Cornell grad in biochemistry making big bucks in agribusiness at the Illinois firm of Archer Daniels Midland. Whitacre charges right at life, hustling the (toxic) wonders of food additives even at his own dinner table with the kids and wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey). But when his firm gets implicated in a global price-fixing scam, Whitacre agrees to cooperate with the FBI and wear a wire. Suddenly, he sees himself as James Bond, calling himself 0014, since he's twice as smart. If only the feds could see through Whitacre's own game of fraud and embezzlement. They do, but it takes years.

It won't take you as long, because Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) cut to the chase. We know from Mark's loon-ball stream of voice-overs that he's already gone from bizarre to bug-****, and the jangle of Marvin Hamlisch's insistently perky score underlines his psychosis. In lesser hands, the nutso approach would do a disservice to the book that New York Times journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent six years reporting and researching. Fear not. There is clever method in the madness of Soderbergh, who knows that greed often wears the face of the banal Everyman. Just look around.

Whitacre is a feast of a role for Damon. "I'm the good guy in all this," he tells FBI agents Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale). And he believes it. Damon gives us the chilling sight of a man persuasively lying to himself in a scam that outdoes anything Soderbergh pulled in Ocean's 11, 12 and 13. Shooting fast and digital in just 30 days, Soderbergh invests the film with the breathless pace of a thriller and the gravity befitting a nation's soul sickness. Damon makes Whitacre recognizably human. Even his wife (a splendid Lynskey) chooses not to see the depths of his desperation. But Soderbergh sees all in his cracked comedy mirror. From sex, lies, and videotape to Che and The Girlfriend Experience, he has searched for new ways to tell stories minus formula and rectitude. Maybe you think Whitacre's story would work better as a docudrama than a fun-house ride into one man's deranged unconscious. I beg to differ. Laugh you will at The Informant!, but it's way too real to laugh off.

A negative review from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES...

By KENNETH TURAN Film Critic

September 18, 2009

The exclamation point at the end of "The Informant!" gives it all away. While the title may promise a straight-ahead drama, that bit of faux-jaunty emphasis shows that nothing of the sort is going on. Which is business as usual these days when Steven Soderbergh is the director.

Soderbergh, who won an Oscar for directing "Traffic" and was nominated for "Erin Brockovich" in the same year, is a filmmaker as exasperating as he is gifted. And not just when he forsakes calculated crowd pleasers like "Ocean's Eleven" for doodles like "Bubble."

Just as there are studio executives who can, so the line goes, turn a go project into a development deal, Soderbergh's apparent resolve to tell interesting stories in uninteresting ways has given his recent work a distinct anti-audience bias. "The Good German" was committed to solving technical challenges at the expense of drama, and "Che" was determined to tell a dramatic story in the most tedious manner.

Like these, "The Informant!" was made by Soderbergh largely to amuse himself. He read a story about a real-life corporate whistle-blower and decided, for reasons only he knows, that it had the makings of a wacky comedy starring an overweight Matt Damon. The result, not unlike those sounds only dogs can hear, is not the most promising way to involve people outside the director's inner circle.

This lack of success is not for lack of trying. Damon does his best to make corporate executive Mark Whitacre a person of interest, but as conceptualized by Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (working from a book by Kurt Eichenwald), Whitacre is not anyone you enjoy spending time with.

Whitacre is introduced as an energetic young executive for agribusiness colossus Archer Daniels Midland, circa 1992, working in the Decatur, Ill., world headquarters and in charge of an ADM plant that's manufacturing a hot new food additive called lysine. When a persistent virus threatens production, Whitacre tells his boss Mick Andreas (Tom Papa) that the Japanese have been sabotaging things but are willing to back off for a price.

Andreas and an understandably concerned ADM security chief, Mark Cheviron (Tom Wilson), call in the FBI. Whitacre is spooked at first, but at the prompting of his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), he uses this as an opportunity to clear his conscience.

ADM, he tells surprised straight-arrow FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard ( Scott Bakula), has been engaged in price-fixing for lysine on an international scale. Because he is a good guy who wants to do what's right, Whitacre agrees to wear a wire and help make the case against his co-workers.

This sounds straightforward enough, but not the way "The Informant!" tells it. A decision has been made to reveal, via extensive use of voice-over, the stream of consciousness passing through Whitacre's head while this drama is taking place. It's apparent almost at once that the man is a motor mind with little control over his thoughts, an ultimate loose cannon who simply cannot focus and who hates, hates, hates to tell a straight-line story.

The problem with this creative decision is twofold, the most obvious being that the thoughts going through Whitacre's mind, whether they concern merino wool or the price of ties, are of negligible interest. It's a trial to be inside his mind for five minutes, let alone the nearly two hours of the film's running time.

More significantly, the nature of the voice-over clues us in from the start that Whitacre is the most unreliable of characters, so later "revelations" about him do not feel that shocking or even revealing. If there's comedy to be found in this gap between talk and action, "The Informant!" has not located it. While this film fits squarely into Soderbergh's recurrent goal of ignoring audience interest when possible, that's the only area in which it can be considered a success.

A *** out of **** review from Lou Lumenick in THE NEW YORK POST...

MATT Damon is goofy perfection as a corporate whistleblower with a secret life and serious credibility issues in “The Informant!,” Steven Soderbergh’s playful companion piece to “Erin Brockovich.”

Loosely based on one of those true stories that’s wilder than fiction, it presents Damon (who gained 30 pounds for the role) as the real-life Mark Whitacre, a research chemist who was rising rapidly through the executive ranks at the agribiz giant Archer Daniels Midland in the early ’90s.

When he blames production problems on sabotage by a Japanese competitor demanding a $10 million extortion payment, ADM calls in the FBI and orders Whitacre to cooperate.

Does he ever, volunteering to a pair of flabbergasted special agents (Scott Bakula, Joel McHale) that ADM has engaged in a massive price-fixing conspiracy with competitors around the world.

Whitacre readily agrees to wear a recording device to tape incriminating meetings and begins calling himself “Agent 0014,” because he’s twice as smart as James Bond.

When the indictments come down after a couple of years, the FBI agents learn Whitacre’s also 10 times as crooked. He’s squirreled away millions of ill-gotten dollars in accounts around the world, even as he kept assuring the FBI that “I’m one of the good guys.”

Seriously delusional and quite possibly bipolar, Whitacre hopes to take over as CEO of ADM when his bosses are busted.

The tipoff that Whitacre is not the hero he presents himself is in the title’s exclamation point, as well as his rambling, free-associative narration that frequently veers from the story line into his personal obsessions, including his collection of sports cars.

And then there’s the infectious, ’60s-style score by Marvin Hamlisch, which at times appears to recycle bits and pieces of music from his two Woody Allen movies, "Take the Money and Run" and "Bananas."

Damon shows terrific bravado in the lead role, leading us through a tricky script by Scott Burns ("The Bourne Ultimatum") based on a book by New York Times investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald.

Melanie Lynskey does well with the challenge of playing Whitacre's oblivious wife, who never questions his wild assertions and who, we are told, was waiting for him after he served nine years in prison.

"The Informant!" is more amusing than laugh-out-loud hilarious, but is never boring. It's certainly a lot more fun and entertaining than Soderbergh's last two films, the deadly serious "Che" and "The Girlfiend Experience."

A mixed review from Joe Morgenstern in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL...

More often than not, the extensive use of voice-over narrative means the filmmakers didn't know how to dramatize their story without it. That seems to be true of "The Informant!", but in an unusual way. Matt Damon's voice-over is the movie's main strength.

Mr. Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, a real-life biochemist who, in the 1990s, became a whistle-blower at the real-life agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. Among Whitacre's many charges was a multinational scheme to fix the price of lysine, an amino acid used as an animal-feed additive. Some of those charges were valid, but others weren't, and Whitacre's handlers at the FBI, as well as prosecutors at the Department of Justice, had a terrible time sorting it all out after their endlessly cooperative witness proved to be a bipolar personality given to whopping lies, and a crook who'd embezzled at least $9 million of ADM's money.

The movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, is an extended comic riff on "The Informant (A True Story)", a book by Kurt Eichenwald. It's overextended and exhaustingly comic, with a score by Marvin Hamlisch—vaudeville music, circus music, Spike Jones-ish music, anachronistically effervescent music from the 1950s—that's the musical equivalent of a hundred bruising pokes in the ribs. Mr. Damon plays it admirably straight, for the most part, thereby serving as a counterweight to the clamorous self-delight that surrounds him. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save the production, which lacks a clear approach to its hero's befuddling lack of clarity.

What does prove amusing, though, is the voice-over stream of Whitacre's consciousness: an impulsive meditation on whether his car's marque is pronounced Porsh-uh or Porsh; a spontaneous tribute to his hands ("I think they're my favorite part of my body"); a self-congratulatory assessment of his time-saving habits ("I'll even floss in the shower while the conditioner is in my hair"); a speculation on whether polar bears know that their noses are black. One of the film's producers, George Clooney, directed a 2002 film called "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." These are revelations of an addled mind, and they're as fascinating as they are funny.

A rave from THE NEW YORK TIMES...

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 18, 2009

If you want to know why Steven Soderbergh tapped Marvin Hamlisch to write the zany score for “The Informant!,” a deadly serious comedy about corporate malfeasance, consider the title’s exclamation point. Like that unexpected mark of exuberance, which hints at fun times (yippee!), the brassy horns and racing piano notes of the neo-slapstick score — think of “Laugh-In,” “Bananas” and Benny Hill — initially suggest that Mr. Soderbergh has put on his party hat and broken out the kazoo. Except that he isn’t laughing, or at least not all the way through. The story he tells is too maddening for sustained mirth, so he kills the jokes, with a vengeance.

Notably, there’s no punctuation mark in the title of Kurt Eichenwald’s book “The Informant: A True Story,” though there might as well be. A real-life whodunit and why, it recounts the strange tale of Mark Whitacre, a biochemist and executive who, starting in the early 1990s, supplied the Federal Bureau of Investigation with hundreds of tapes that implicated his firm, Archer Daniels Midland, in a global price-fixing scheme. Known as the supermarket to the world, A.D.M. manufactures, among many other products, the kinds of ingredients that invariably show up in tiny print on the labels of almost everything we eat, mystery matter like lecithin, sorbitol and xanthan gum. It also produces lysine, an amino acid given to feedlot cattle and other livestock.

Lysine proved to be the downfall of A.D.M., or rather its very costly mistake, though that’s getting ahead of the secrets and lies of this movie, which opens with Mark (Matt Damon) waxing philosophical about corn. Over a series of elegant, uncluttered, precisely framed, softly lighted images that are representative of the movie’s visual design, he expounds on the remarkable diversity of corn, the wonder starch. It’s amazing stuff, all righty, he explains in his characteristic intimate voice-over, the words rushing and gushing, unwinding in unbroken if sometimes tangled threads. You then see him talking up corn to one of his sons, first over a meal and then in a red Porsche zipping down the road, an image Mr. Soderbergh briefly flips upside down.

This shot, while it might be mistaken for a filmmaker’s fillip, introduces the topsy-turvy world Mark enters as soon as he steps into the office, where he strides through the sterile headquarters accompanied by his own jaunty theme music. Gently plumped, with a mouth-breather’s slack smile, he looks like an overgrown baby and is, if a generously paid one. A biochemist and the company’s youngest vice president, he earns a salary hefty enough to stuff a garage with sports cars and cram a large house with all the ugly knickknacks and furniture money can buy. He’s living high on the hog making supplements for hogs. When he stands on his manicured lawn seemingly deep in thought, he looks every overfed inch like the American dream.

It’s the cost of that dream that Mr. Soderbergh takes stock of in this smart, cynical movie about how we buy now — oops, I mean, how we live now. Money makes the world go ’round in “The Informant!,” much as it does everywhere and much as it most certainly does in his previous movie, “The Girlfriend Experience,” about a young prostitute selling her waxed wares. This time, though, Mr. Soderbergh has trained his focus and expertly wielded digital camera on the other side of the buy-and-sell equation, on the men in suits who fly in corporate planes, nursing drinks while they chortle about the breasts of their female employees. These are masters of our universe, the big little men who control and distort world markets.

Mr. Whitacre rose swiftly through their ranks until he took a detour into the wilderness. The extreme nature of that turn isn’t immediately evident in the movie, a masterwork of narrative compression that the screenwriter Scott Z. Burns distilled from the book’s some 600 detailed pages. (Mr. Eichenwald covered the story for The New York Times.) You’ll never miss a thing. Like Mr. Soderbergh, Mr. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) doesn’t appear to have much use for narrative fat. And so they rapidly move Mark into position and just as quickly bring in the F.B.I. agents, Shephard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale), who, after wiring up Mark’s body and briefcase, become so touchingly protective of him that they carry around a photo of his family.

In time the agents sour on their cooperating witness, a grudging metamorphosis that parallels your own. Mr. Damon’s inherent likeability makes him something of a Trojan horse here, not only because he’s a star (and therefore beloved by definition), but also because he’s so boyish no matter the part. That’s true even in “The Informant!,” though he’s been gleefully uglied up for the role with a fake bulbous nose and real pudge. Mr. Damon’s physical choices tell you a lot about the character long before the truth seeps out. As does Mark’s tendency to drift into banalities in the voice-over — he natters on about ties, polar bears and butterflies while the scandal unfolds — a brilliant screenwriting device that hints at an inner duality.

Something was surely off about Mark, though he and even A.D.M. were really symptoms of a greater disease — greed, corruption, name your capitalist vice — that was eating away at the country, until it popped bubbles, forced millions out of work and plunged the United States into the economic abyss. In films like “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic” Mr. Soderbergh has so successfully sexed up the social-issue picture, casting stars as crusading cops and bodacious do-gooders, that it’s been easy to diminish or simply ignore the passion of his commitment. That passion has been more overt in his last two efforts, “The Girlfriend Experience” and “Che,” his epic account of the revolutions won and lost by Che Guevara. In this movie it rages.

For all the silly walks and comic cameos, anger fuels “The Informant!,” giving it its pulse and reason for being. Anger inspires its giggles, forces its tears and might even explain the fiery orange that colors so many faces, as if this world and its people were on the verge of immolation. Like all of Mr. Soderbergh’s movies, this one can be appreciated on purely formal terms, for the clarity of its images and the economy of the storytelling. But it is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling. In the face of such corruption perhaps only laughter will do: after all, for a while now the joke has most definitely been on us.

I have very mixed feelings about this film. Matt Damon is excellent in a difficult role and the illegal activities his character gets involved in are shocking and hilarious. I think that is enough to make it worth seeing ONCE. Yet the schticky, whizz-bang score by Marvin Hamlisch is a fairly constant annoyance. If it was used SPARINGLY maybe it could have worked but it is constant din. People groaned in the theatre because of it. It is like the most obnoxious laugh track poking you in the ribs and telling you "isn't this so funny". There would be more laughs without it and the film-maker should have trusted in the script. Also, the stylistic decision to make the photography and clothing/art direction style appear to be out of the 1970s, a nod to "All the President's Men" I would think, also works better on paper than onscreen.

I think this is a film where most audience members will agree with the negative reviews. Many will not get it at all. At my screening several people walked out.

"The Informant!" is funny and scored with tounge-in-cheek glee. For me the movie hinges on the performance of Matt Damon and he more than delivers.

It was nice, seeing the Smother's Brothers.