The Informant!

(Movie Review)

This film had gotten a number of good reviews, and I was curious to check it out.

It took me a bit to get into it. The first hour or so I was largely indifferent to the story it was telling, partly I suppose because I didn’t find any of the characters very sympathetic. (I know that’s the whole point of the movie, but it still kept me slightly at arm’s length.) And then as the story unfolded, by the last hour or so I was really hooked.

The film is a true story about a whistle blower who, it turns out, has plenty of problems of his own.

The film doesn’t really hide his problems. You sense that something’s a bit off right from the start. But the film doesn’t completely show you everything straight off either, and so as the film progresses more and more is revealed.

Although much of the film is played for comedy, it does contain at its heart an important question: how much protection should whistle blowers have? Matt Damon’s character, the real life Mark Whitacre, ended up serving a prison sentence 3 times as long as the people he blew the whistle on. Yes, he embezzled 9 million dollars, but the movie hints that this would never have come to light if he hadn’t alerted the FBI to the price fixing scam. If only uncorrupt people are allowed to become whistle blowers, then does this mean most of the corruption is never going to be uncovered?

As I said though, a lot of this is actually played for comedy in the film. And some of it works pretty well. I got a couple laughs out of some scenes.
However the film’s main gag is that it gives us access into the head of Mark Whitacre (the main character). The film will show one scene, and then there will be a voice over giving us insight into what Mark Whitacre is actually thinking at the time. Often it’s something completely unrelated, like how polar bears hide their black noses to blend in with the snow.
I’m not quite sure what the point of this is. It might be a way of mocking Mark Whitacre, or hinting that he’s not altogether normal. And as the film progresses, it’s obvious Mark Whitacre has mental illness problems, but this seems to be completely unrelated to the little mental thought balloons we get glimpses of throughout the film. And in fact, constantly having random thoughts about things unrelated to the subject at hand is something we all do. Like a lot of common human eccentricities, it seems a bit ridiculous when you focus in on it with just one character, but it’s a common enough human trait. You could do that with any character in any movie.

I suspect what happened is that someone was worried the movie couldn’t really stand on its own without throwing in some running gag to spice it up a little. But frankly, I found these constant asides mostly annoying.

Link of the Day
Philosophers and Public Philosophy

The Informant!: Movie Review (Scripted)