The Informant! (2009)

Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! arrives dressed as a corporate whistleblower thriller and turns out to be something stranger: a study of a man who cannot stop lying even when the truth would serve him. Matt Damon, padded by twenty or thirty pounds, plays Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland executive who hands the FBI a price-fixing conspiracy and then quietly embezzles nine million dollars while wearing a wire for three years. The film's irony is relentless. Every voiceover is a small confession of vanity, and the hero's inner monologue is mostly about himself.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and we should say so plainly. The cast is white and comfortable, with no representation ambitions to speak of and no interest in race, climate, or the body as a political subject. What the film does carry is a mild contempt for corporate collusion, the sort of white-collar greed that fixes the price of lysine and calls it business. That contempt is real but modest, since the man exposing it is a bigger fraud than the men he exposes. The one genuinely modern thread is Whitacre's bipolar disorder, which the film treats as the engine of his unraveling, manic episodes stacking on trivia and magazine articles until the whole scheme collapses inward. Melanie Lynskey's Ginger gets a moment of moral push, urging her husband toward the whistle, and then the film moves on.

None of this amounts to a sermon. Soderbergh observes, smirks, and declines to instruct, which keeps the preaching to a minimum. The result is a comedy about a man who mistakes himself for a hero of the common man and is sentenced to three times the prison term of the criminals he helped catch. The film finds that funny. So did I, mostly.