For much of the movie he’s a bumbling buffoon, his James Bond fantasies providing comical contrast to his unsubtle espionage technique. Burns (who also wrote The Bourne Ultimatum) and, to some extent, Damon all seem unclear on just how well we’re supposed to know Mark Whitacre or how we should feel about him. That may be, but if I’m going to descend into a delusional netherworld with a movie’s protagonist, I need to emerge from it with some clearer sense of who he is. The Washington Post’s Dan Kois, who discussed The Informant! with me in a Spoiler Special podcast (see link above), mounted a well-argued case that the sense of brain fog that descends during this middle section of the movie was exactly the effect Soderbergh was going for: that the audience’s state of confusion was meant to mirror Mark’s own. The process by which the increasingly perplexed FBI agents (and Mark’s incredulous lawyer, played by king of the slow burn Tony Hale) figure this all out makes up the murky second act of the movie. Archer Daniels Midland is a corrupt player in the agribusiness industry, and Mark Whitacre is a pathological liar. Is ADM really defrauding its stockholders, or is Mark just making shit up?īefore long, it becomes clear that both things are true. Later, when Mark describes a Japanese competitor visiting his office in an attempt to extort money from ADM, it seems odd that Soderbergh won’t provide a visual flashback doesn’t he know to show and not tell? Then we realize that the encounter with the Japanese man may never have happened. His opening voiceover, at first cheerfully expository, quickly begins to drift into free-association territory (“ Pen in German is Kugelschreiber … so many syllables just to say pen“). But there are signs from early on that something is amiss with Mark.
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