The Informant!

Off-kilter Soderbergh spy drama Discuss this article

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There’s an effortlessness at play here that makes you think The Informant! is the sort of off-kilter movie Soderbergh could churn out while dozing. But that doesn’t prevent this seriocomic morality tale from being a hoot. Matt Damon delivers one of his most memorably multifaceted turns as Illinois-based family man and agri-business corporate executive Mark Whitacre, who decides, quite arbitrarily, that he wants to blow
the whistle on an industry-wide price-fixing scam. Swaddled in a love-it-or-loathe it big band jazz soundtrack from Marvin Hamlisch, Soderbergh’s film is as interested in presenting the paradoxical nature of Whitacre’s psychological motivations as it is the mindboggling particulars of his epic rise and fall.

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