Movie Review:
9-25-09 Movie Review: Informant
Noncommercial movies are scheduled for tonight and Sunday, at the Orpheum and the Blank Page gallery. Thursday at 7 the Orpheum is showing what some people regard as the greatest musical ever made, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain, with Donald O’Conner, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen in a story of Hollywood facing the dangers of sound in the late twenties. And at 7:30 Sunday the Blank Page is showing The World According to Monsanto, a French documentary about genetic experimentation with seeds to produce grains unlike anything Nature creates. That’s 7 tonight at the Orpheum for Singin’ in the Rain and Sunday 7:30 forAnd commercially we have Matt Damon in The Informant, for which he gained 30 pounds and deglamorized himself to an impressive extent. It’s all about chicanery and price-fixing and ruthless ambition in the supergiant agricultural company Archer Daniels Midland back in the early nineties, and it’s based on a true story that was told in a book by Kurt Eichenwald by the same title, The Informant. It’s a story in which virtually everybody is tinged with corruption of some kind, or at least suspicious of such, from Damon as the Informant who blew the whistle, through Scott Bacula as the FBI agent he talked to, through the top company executives, maybe even including Melanie Lynskey as Damon’s wife, who stood by her man regardless of evidence against him, whether she thought he was innocent or not. Typical business stuff, but this time it’s different.
For one thing, I don’t know of any recent movie that depends so much on dialogue and plot and so little on action, violence, or sex. The comedy aspect grows from the endless treacheries, with everybody using everybody else for personal purposes, or at least seeming to – it’s not easy to decide what primary motivations are, and I doubt that the characters themselves could illuminate us very much. Even after The Informant was over, I enjoyed trying to decide which lies were part of the original scam, which were incidintal to it, which were defensive when things started to fall apart, of which, if any, were just involuntary reactions on the part of the people who lies almost by instinct. And since there was never any emphasis on the suffering all this could cause, there was no such emotional involvement as would interfere with my enjoyment of all the rich and powerful people being exposed as pretty worthless after all.
You’ll get lost in the twists and turns, probably, but there are occasional explanations worked into the story that help clarify things, so just be patient and you’ll get back on track. The bits of internal action on the sound track, telling us what’s going on in Damon’s mind, will not help, however, because his mind is always nattering on about irrelevant detail till you’ll wonder how this guy can get dressed in the morning, much less plot anything; we’re told he’s bipolar, but we are given good reason to doubt that that is the cause of anything. The Informant does not try to explain the world; it just observes it, from the cool distance.
There are obviously no deep character studies, but physical casting and precise acting keeps the characters distinct from each other, For once, we have a movie that seems to have had a complete script before shooting started and that knew in advance what each shot was supposed to accomplish. I wish The Informant would inspire imitation, but don’t hold your breath.
