The Informant! (film)

The Informant! is a 2009 movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon. It is Based on a True Story. The movie concerns itself with Mark Whitacre, an employee of ADM, a food production company. A probe into a possible sabotage turns Mark into a whistleblower for the FBI, as part of a multi-year investigation into worldwide price fixing. But Mark himself is hiding a couple of shocking secrets as well...

Unlike most films about this subject matter that are inspired by a true story, this is Played for Laughs. Mostly. So there.


 * Amoral Attorney: A number of these appear in the last thirty minutes of the film.
 * Bad Liar: Mark is constantly guilty of this, especially audacious when
 * Black Comedy
 * Book Dumb: Inverted - Mark is extremely intelligent on paper, but in reality he's an utter moron.
 * Brick Joke: The inner monologues come back with a vengeance. Also, the FBI agents admonish Whitacre for talking to the press about the investigation (which Whitacre still does). A few scenes later, the agents are talking to Ginger about Mark's well-being when one of the agents exasperatedly blurts out, "He's GOT to stop talking to people!"
 * California Doubling: Averted. The entire film was filmed on location (and there are many locations, from small town Illinois and Indiana, to a brief scene in St. Louis and even scenes in Hawaii and Zurich, Switzerland).
 * Chaotic Stupid: While he always believes that he's a Knight in Shining Armor kind of guy, the film shows that Mark is this.
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Whitacre is a textbook case.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: This is a movie about them, and how they fixed the prices of high fructose corn syrup and other biochemicals.
 * Dyeing for Your Art: Matt Damon gained 20-30 pounds to play Whitacre.
 * Excited Show Title!
 * Fake American: The lovely Melanie Lynskey, a native of New Zealand, plays Whitacre's wife.
 * The Informant: Mark is an informant for two and a half years for the FBI. He claims to join them out of a guilty conscience about price fixing, except that it's really a haphazard cover for an attempted takeover of the company.
 * Inner Monologue: Mark is constantly mentioning odd facts while other characters are talking.
 * Internal Reformist: Mark Whitaker starts the movie as a whistleblower.
 * The Nineties: The early Nineties -- so early it's practically The Eighties.
 * "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer
 * To note: Current day employees of the ADM company received a formal letter at home urging them not to answer any questions regarding the subject matter of the movie, if they would receive any.
 * The Reveal: Those odd inner monologues  Oh, and Mark is very much
 * Running Gag:  rises as the film goes on, right to his very last lines.
 * Mark's ridiculous (and ridiculously funny) inner monologues.
 * Mark telling people his parents died in a car accident and he was taken in by an amusement park owner from Ohio.
 * People keep telling Mark not to talk to anyone else about the investigation, only for him to spill his guts to anyone who will listen in the next scene.
 * In the latter half of the movie, it becomes clear to those paying close attention that Mark has started wearing a wig to hide the fact he's gone bald. By the end, he gives this up along with all his other lies (maybe).
 * Soundtrack Dissonance: The film score is mostly 60s-esque boppish ditties, like an early Woody Allen movie, while Whitacre's master embezzlement plan keeps unfolding; James Bond-ish motifs pop up when Whitacre is knee-deep in his spy fantasies.
 * Trailers Always Lie: The trailors for the movie greatly exaggerated the comedic lean of the movie. While it is humorous, it's more Coens-esque dark and deadpan than light-hearted and screwball (the trailers touts itself as being from "The Director of Ocean's 11, 12, and 13")
 * This may be deliberate since
 * Unreliable Narrator
 * Where Are They Now? Epilogue: Showing the sentences of those arrested.
 * Very Loosely Based on a True Story
 * Villain Protagonist
 * You Might Remember Me From: Hey, it's Scott Bakula!