The Informant! (2009)

Welcome to the corn mafia world .. a bit exaggerated, but that's pretty much the impression you get after the first 10 minutes of the movie. Movie which is based on the real case of ADM, one of the biggest cereal processors worldwide. As a genre I don't know exactly where to fit the movie - it seems like a drama with a serious quantity of satire/dry humor and of course with sufficient documentary value. Talking about the last part, maybe is better to start with some history ...

In the middle of the 90's the aforementioned corporation was involved in an international price fixing scandal. If the term is not very clear, in a few words it relates with explicitly negotiating the product prices, or other factors directly influencing these, between more firms, theoretically in competition on the market or at least involved in the same industry somehow. The idea is of course to get maximum profit from the sales, and the described practice is illegal as far as I know in many countries, at least on some markets. Well .. getting back to the movie and to the particular case it depicts, ADM got to be investigated by FBI in US based on the information provided by one of its high ranking executives - Mark Whitacre. "The Informant!" pretty much tells all the guy's story, and what is said about that on the movie poster: "unbelievable" is quite close to the truth. Without giving too many details, I'll refer to a line from the movie, quoted approximately - why a guy with a wife, children, a salary of 350000$ per year and at two steps from the CEO position in the firm will wake up one day thinking to bring down his own employer ? As a light spoiler, the movie doesn't answer you explicitly to this question. You could choose a reason from what is presented to you, starting from plain remorse on doing right vs. doing wrong or just getting in the mood to spice up your life by getting a James Bond assignment (well .. more the feeling, less the action), but all pretty much all of these contradict between themselves at some point. Anyway, if I'm gonna continue the idea I'll say too much, and besides that the opinions are quite personal (and I think that's exactly what the movie wants, for everybody to get their own interpretation of the facts) .. so, I'll stop here with this part.

I think this is the first movie made by Soderbergh, that I actually liked. Not very much, but I can consider it as being ok - it wasn't boring at least, thing that happened with the "Ocean's ..." trilogy and also with another real-case based drama: "Erin Brockovich" (I haven't seen "Traffic" yet). As a general feeling, it reminded me a bit about "Catch Me If You Can" by Spielberg, which is again real-case based, although a different kind of story. Matt Damon, who's not actually on my favorite actors list, makes one of the best roles in his career in this picture. Besides that, I don't know what else I might add ... The cinematography and the editing are pretty much Soderbergh specific to say so = the idea, as least as I can feel it, is to give you an air of real drama that happened some years ago (which is after all the case here). The score is on the comic/satire side of the movie, and is probably the main "technical area" element meant to cut the tension so it won't rise to a level where you can actually feel it.

Overall, a watchable movie, but a bit less than I expected (and talking about expectations, in a different sense however ... what you can see in the trailer isn't very much related as feeling with you get to see in the movie ... = less comic, more drama)

Rating: 3 out of 5