zetes Review of The Informant!

The Informant! (2009)

Damon is exceptional, and the film around him is quite good, as well

[8/10 · 20 September 2009]

Prolific auteur Steven Soderbergh's newest film is a corporate crime comedy starring Matt Damon as a real-life informant for the FBI. His goal was to expose the industry he worked in for their price fixing. He comes to the FBI (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale in particular) as a "guy in a white hat", just a biochemist who worked his way up to the corporate office and was appalled at the practices he observed. The truth was much less black and white - not only was he thinking that, with all his bosses gone, he'd be the head of his company, but he was also embezzling money from the company just in case that didn't work out. The story is good, but the thing that you'll go home remembering is Matt Damon. He's been a very good actor for a long time now - I would even say under-appreciated (he was the best thing about The Departed, for instance, and he was barely ever recognized for it). The Informant! is probably his best work to date, and I hope his industry recognizes it. It definitely helps that he has a great character to work with. We frequently hear his inner thoughts, and we begin to understand him. Or at least we think we do. Even by the end of the film, we realize that there are facets to this man that are still hidden. Perhaps he doesn't even know these facets himself. The film itself would probably rank as one of the best of the year, but Soderbergh makes one tragic mistake: the comic score. Comic scores are difficult. If you make them too goofy, you can make it seem like you're trying too hard. And with a drier comedy like The Informant!, you run the risk of undercutting the comedy if you underplay it in the score. Unfortunately, Marvin Hamlisch makes the former mistake quite terribly. The score plays like its backing a circus performance, with frequent, corny James Bond parody bits (Damon at one point claims he's 0014, because he's twice as smart as 007). It significantly harms the film.