This Steve Soderbergh true-life ‘comedy’ drove us nuts: the audience I saw it with wanted to leap up and kill Matt Damon’s insultingly fraudulent corporate Veepee. The ‘nice guy jerk’ poses as a whistleblower while betraying everyone who crosses his path. Yet he squeaks by with an ‘oh I’m so innocent’ act. It’s more a comment on a new kind of business vermin that cover their greed and chicanery with oh-so-sincere personality quirks. It’s another worthy Soderbergh creation, now on 4K.

The Informant! — 4K
4K Ultra HD
Warner Home Video
2009 / Colo / 1:85 widescreen / 108 min. / Street Date April 15, 2025 / Available from moviezyng / 24.99
Starring: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey, Tom Wilson, Scott Bakula, Tom Papa, Clancy Brown.
Cinematography: Peter Andrews (Steven Soderbergh)
Production Designer: Doug J. Meerdink
Art Directors: William O. Hunter, David E. Scott
Costume Design: Shoshana Rubin
Film Editor: Steven Mirrone
Original Music: Marvin Hamlisch
Screenplay Written by Scott Z. Burns from the book by Kurt Eichenwald
Produced by Howard Braunstein, Kurt Eichenwald, Jennifer Fox, Gregory Jacobs, Michael Jaffe
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Have business ethics turned the corner so radically that even a pretense of honesty is no longer required?  Exposés of corrupt practices and rule-breaking usually infuriate or make us despair. This show remains funny no matter how absurd things become … we believe every new revelation. It’s one of Steve Soderbergh’s ‘Red One Camera’ digital cinema projects, that he filmed himself under an alias. It’s now been given the bump to 4K Ultra HD, displaying the director’s achievement in an even better light. Get ready for lots of cheerful pastel corporate interiors.

The Informant! is an industrial whistleblower comedy that, halfway through, turns its lampoon stick on the audience. Based on a true price-fixing scandal from the late 1990s. The tale of Mark Whitacre and ADM is like a stone overturned to reveal the unpleasant underside of big business: even when egregious corruption is revealed and reported, nothing changes.

Taken from Kurt Eichenwald’s nonfiction book, The Informant! centers on Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), an executive who at first seems a paragon of good will. Archer Daniels Midland is a giant agri-business company, and its energetic VeePee Whitacre is placed in charge of getting a lysine plant going. When Whitacre becomes aware of what looks like sabotage in the production line, he reports that a Japanese contact is extorting a high price for an ‘antidote’ to the problem. Mark’s corporate peers demand that the FBI be called in. To our surprise, after initial meetings Mark reveals to the congenial FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) that the extortion plot is but the tip of the iceberg, that ADM is engaged with other large international corporations in a price-fixing scheme. The company is reaping hundreds of millions in illegal profits.

Shepard and his FBI superiors are impressed that Whitacre is willing to jeopardize his lucrative career to expose the crime. They are further amazed when their whistleblower actively records hundreds of meetings in an effort to get audio and video proof of the criminal conspiracy. He seems far too tickled by his self-image as a daring secret agent. The way Whitacre’s wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) embraces denial and supports her husband’s wild schemes is also rather disturbing. All seems on the up-and-up, but Whitacre’s behaviorial quirks soon become more pronounced. He surprises his FBI handlers with disturbing information that he should have revealed at the very start. ‘Oh, was that important?’ It isn’t long before his reliability comes into question.

Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon collaborated several times, starting with the audience-pleasing remake of  Ocean’s Eleven. Damon also stars in Soderbergh’s excellent  Contagion, the show that accurately predicted aspects of the COVID pandemic. Here Damon is faced with a real acting challenge, as the odd Mark Whitacre character could easily veer into satrical exaggeration. But The Informant! is a depressingly true story. Unlike Michael Mann’s sober  The Insider, this look at the futility of whistle-blowing against increasingly powerful corporations gives us little hope that conditions can be changed. Large companies use their clout to elbow out competition, and when the big players corner a market, they collude to rip off the public at large.

The Informant! begins as if it were a lighthearted comedy, complete with a main title font appropriate for a grown-up Disney family film. Marvin Hamlisch’s kitschy score also seems a throwback to the early 1970s. We’re soon suspicious of Mark Whitacre’s constant voiceovers, meandering trivia sidebars about whatever pops into his head. The man’s ramblings soon become infuriating. Even as Whitacre’s credibility is going down in flames, his idiotic observations and bits of wisdom continue, all laced with self-serving lies. Months into his secret job as a special informant, Mark begins admitting that ‘little’ things he told his FBI handlers weren’t entirely true. The ‘little’ things are potentially disastrous, seriously compromising his credibility as an informant. The same hilarious (or excruciating) exchange crops up again and again:

FBI Agent Shepard:

“So is this it? Have you told us everything? Is there any more?

Whitacre:

That’s it so help me God.”

From that point on he’s a veritable onion of unreliability, shedding successive new layers of dishonesty bit by bit. It soon becomes clear that Whitacre is hiding major monetary malfeasance of his own.

It would be unfair to divulge the major plot turns, although they’re a matter of record if one wants to look up Mark Whitacre on the web. His absurdities remain funny but begin to hurt as we realize that the real joke has been on us, the general public:  Men at the center of America’s wealth sometimes behave like cashiers robbing the till.

The essential advocacy documentary The Corporation is built on the thesis that corporations are psychotic constructions that lie, cheat and connive to make a profit; morals are irrelevant and legality is just another business variable. Through Matt Damon’s performance, Mark Whitacre embodies that ethic 100%. His capacity for casual mendacity makes him a sociopath of the highest order. Denying his wrongdoings and counter-accusing his accusers, the privileged jerk comes off as ‘The New American’ who will do and say anything to feed his enormous ego and keep the gravy train rolling.

After everything died down, ADM weathered the inconvenience of this episode. It is today still a happy multi-billion-dollar going concern. Mark Whitacre went through a rough spell, including a prison sentence. It is a surprise that he was soon working once more as an executive in a position of responsibility?  It is no wonder that white collar crooks act as they do — the system frequently gives them a free pass.

The joke is indeed on us, the public that winks at white collar hijinks while discriminating against ‘honest’ bank robbers. Mark Whitacre is the new kind of corporate sociopath. His manner and speech all but ooze honesty, yet his every interaction is another level of deception, with the truth spun to favor his personal aims.

The Informant! is truly an adult entertainment. It can’t have been an easy sell on first release. Warners promoted it as a Ha-Ha comedy with references to Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 pictures. Those moneymakers made possible the director’s more arcane experiments. Matt Damon’s presence insured mainstream attention for this feature, but its elevated business and legal context don’t add up to general appeal. Some viewers likely rejected the film’s depiction of the American Success Story as fundamentally dysfunctional. Our system rewards personal initiative, but it also enables predators.  A mass theatrical audience still existed in 2009. It was looking for entertainment, not illuminating revelations, and preferred the fairy-tale pandering of shows like The Blind Side. That feel-good movie says that America isn’t racist because a sassy white Memphis millionairess adopted a black child and raised him to be a football star.

We don’t find The Informant! to be cynical or vindictive, even with Damon’s formidable impersonation of a puffed-up executive Vice President. The movie isn’t likely to inspire other corporate employees to step up and reveal company crimes, that’s for sure. Whitacre is managed by ethical law officials that can’t understand why he is performing his noble service as a whistleblower. Law enforcement agencies are also bureaucracies, with careerists that prioritize the goal of big convictions. Few would blow the whistle on their own superiors, unless something was in it for them. As it turns out, Mark Whitacre’s motives are anything but idealistic.

Soderbergh’s movie reminds us of Robert Redford’s 1994 movie  Quiz Show, about America’s obsession with game shows that promise something for nothing, and encourage dishonesty. As with The Informant!, the joke is definitely on the audience. In its final image, the movie literally laughs at us.

Steven Soderbergh’s movie also has similarities with the ‘moral vaccuum’ situation in writer-director Billy Ray’s  Shattered Glass from 2003. It chronicles the downfall of magazine writer Stephen Glass, whose stellar career came to an abrupt halt when The New Republic discovered that he had blatantly falsified his reportage. When caught and pressured about his unethical behavior, Glass (Hayden Christensen) acts surprised and hurt, ‘innocently’ asking things like, “Are you mad at me?”

These movies correlate corrupt practices with a kind of American male infantalism: if success is everything, anything one can get away with is A-OK, laudible, in fact. The two movies are excellent teaching tools for the disappearing concept of personal integrity. With so many bright new business students eager to get out in the public sector and ‘create wealth’ (= skim unearned profits) from the American success machine, it’s no wonder that our system is unbalanced. Whitacre is a poster boy for this ethic of corporate entitlement.

Warner Home Video’s 4K Ultra HD disc of The Informant! bumps Steven Soderbergh’s film to the high-level format, highlighting production design and camerawork that emphasizes the modern corporate look in offices and hotels — it’s the pastel-cheerful world of older ‘organization man’ comedies and dramas — just a little darker, and richer in color.

4K fully replicates the theatrical experience. On the big screen we liked the image derived from the Red One camera, which Steven Soderbergh first tried out for his previous feature  Che. The system got mixed reviews from industry technicians but Soderbergh believed in it wholeheartedly. Colors are bright in the corporate offices and we see plenty of detail in Mark Whitacre’s smug little super-success lifestyle — his beautiful house in the cornfield, his spiffy ‘daily driver’ Ferrari.

Marvin Hamlisch’s music score purposely concentrates on inane little cues that equate Mark Whitacre’s devious schemes with the innocuous antics of a TV situation comedy. Mark’s self-congratulatory narration blurbs should tip us off to the film’s subversive agenda, but the music is helpful emphasis, telling us that the movie is keeping an ironic distance from Mark’s infuriating behaviors.

Important note: there is no standard Blu-ray backup disc in this release … it’s just the 4K disc alone.

The Blu-ray disc carries two extras. Steve Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns’ commentary is both informative and entertaining. We learn that the film’s comedy angle and the detached voiceover were part of their plan from the beginning. Soderbergh proudly explains his hiring of a number of standup comedians as actors, in substantial roles as well as fleeting bits: Tom Wilson, Joel McHale, Tom Papa, Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, Dwayne Andreas. Capping the ‘cast a comic’ idea, both Smothers Brothers turn up in serious courtroom scenes and do quite well.  →

A brief group of cut scenes is added. One is a nice bit where the FBI agents worry whether Whitacre is running a scam on them. We also see the actual confrontation where Whitacre is still dreaming of being elevated to the presidency, even as he is ordered out of the corporate headquarters.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Informant!
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Commentary by director Steven Soderbergh and Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns
Deleted Scenes
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc in Keep case
Reviewed: May 30, 2025
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