![]() To the director, the actor, and theoretically writer Scott Z. ![]() The Informant! is Mark Whitacre of Archer Daniels Midland, played with no small amount of zeal by friend of Soderbergh Matt Damon, covered in just-about-perfect fake hair and fat, though there's much more to the performance than just body modification. All the humor on display is pitched from the same angle: God, people can be atrociously dumb, ain't it great? At any rate, it's no The Insider, and indeed it seems as though the point was at least in part to take the piss out of the seriousness of that film and its ilk - it especially seems like a notoriously experimental, audience-unfriendly director attempting to apologise for once having given the world the fine but unexceptional prestige picture Erin Brockovich. A comedy it may be, but a desperately cynical comedy about a man who wants to be a hero but can't square that with a career full of the most terrible, self-serving acts, and who eventually goes to jail. More than anything else he's ever made - more than the cool zaniness of the Ocean's films, more than the sardonic yuppy parody of sex, lies and videotape - this is a full-on comedy, although it is still a Soderbergh film, and the people who allow the poster and ad campaign to fool them into thinking that it's a wacky romp will be in for at least a bit of a crippling disappointment. That wacky exclamation point tells us most of what we need to know about the movie, including what sets it apart from the great majority of Soderbergh's preceding work. But from that film's classically-influenced digital cinematography and poetic-documentary style, the director leaped to the sometimes maddeningly opaque social commentary and meta-narrative play of The Girlfriend Experience back in March, before finally coming to the mock-Oscarbait true story of an agribusiness whistleblower, The Informant! It's not new for the monumentally prolific Steven Soderbergh to release two movies in a single calendar year, nor is it new that those two films should represent strikingly different styles and narrative interests, but I am comfortable in claiming that 2009 is something of a banner year for showcasing the man's chameleonic skills, particularly if we count the epic Che dyad as a 2009 release, on account of that nobody outside of New York or Los Angeles got to see it during its flash release in December.
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