The Informant!

At first glance, Steven Soderbergh's new film "The Informant!" looks, on paper, like several of the Oscar-winning director's other films. Based on the true story of an Archer Daniels Midland executive who supplied information to the FBI in a price-fixing investigation, the little-guy-against-the-megacorporation plot evokes "Erin Brockovich." With the whistle-blower's hidden cameras and microphones, there's a nod to the con-artist chicanery of "Ocean's Eleven." The look into the world of money and melting-down institutions echoes some of the themes of Soderbergh's experimental indie "The Girlfriend Experience." You lean into what kind of movie you expect "The Informant!" to be and then, judo-style, it uses your momentum of expectation to throw you in unexpected directions. Within the first few minutes of "The Informant!" something stronger and stranger than what you were expecting kicks in: What's with the blobby retro-font of the credits? Why is the Marvin Hamlisch score so bouncy and jazzy? Why, if the story's set in the '90s, do the fashions all look so '70s and blocky?

I think all those questions have the same answer, and I've been thinking about "The Informant!" a lot since I saw it. It's the kind of movie in which the laughs, and there are plenty of them, serve as camouflage for the smart stuff going on underneath. As we watch high-level executive Mark Whitacre (a burly, mustached Matt Damon) go through his business and betray his employers, what sinks in is that "The Informant!" looks like a '70s movie or '80s TV show because, inside his head, that's how Whitacre sees the world. He is the star of his own heroic tale. Telling an associate (which he shouldn't be doing) about his work for the FBI, he explains he calls himself "Double-0 Fourteen," "because I'm twice as smart as James Bond." Whitacre is a horrible liar. He tells huge fibs to his bosses and his FBI handlers (played with deadpan authority by Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, but he also tells those lies badly, all stammers and evasions, the untalented Mr. Ripley.

So though we first see Archer Daniels Midland as a place where "corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other" and where executives plot with their foreign competition to fix prices, rig profits and rip off consumers on a global level, we come to understand that Whitacre isn't the white knight he imagines he is, and that we, like him, are trying to fit the facts and realities of the situation into a familiar narrative arc that doesn't work. Movies and TV have told us that people like Whitacre will be vindicated, that they have the strength of 10 because their hearts are pure. "The Informant!" is in no small part about what happens when life doesn't match up with the way the movies and TV have told us it should be.

Damon's amazing here: He's funny, yes, but he's also so good, so strong, so willing to dig in and work in his performance as Whitacre that what starts as a broad bit of buffoonery goes from the comedic to the tragic. Damon does the broad stuff here extraordinarily well, but there are smaller moments that count among his best work; there's a shot where Whitacre makes a simple movement -- you'll know it when you see it -- that gets a huge laugh and at the same time breaks your heart. And in the director's chair, Soderbergh makes Scott Z. Burns' screenplay an even weirder, wilder ride, working as his own director of photography alongside "Traffic" editor Stephen Mirrione. The two of them create a world that's tinged with Whitacre's worldview, and bring it to life on-screen with buzzy, bleak energy. There are a lot of comedians in the cast (McHale, Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt, Scott Adsit, both Smothers Brothers, Tony Hale), but Soderbergh gets the laughs by playing things straight, and his standout cast of stand-ups and funny people plays things with deadpan calm and plenty of long pauses. Melanie Lynskey ("Away We Go") plays Whitacre's faithful, steadfast wife, which is how wives are supposed to be in stories like this. But she also plays the deeper, realer shades that play out as Whitacre's words and actions snarl around themselves and topple over.

I still can't tell if "The Informant!" casually commits the same sin it rails against or deliberately highlights it; as Whitacre's transgressions come to light, they overshadow the wrongs his employer committed, both in the court cases and in the film. And, yes, Whitacre broke a few laws and took some money, but Archer Daniels Midland, as he puts it, "held up every breakfast table in America." "The Informant!" looks back at an age it seems we're still living in, one where there's no right and wrong, just an endless cycle of profit, production and promotion in the name of increased shareholder value and making sure you stay on the Fortune 500 list. Whitacre turned out to be a tattered jester instead of a white knight, a bipolar Don Quixote in a bad brown suit. But the thing about "The Informant!" that sticks with you even when you're done laughing is that while Whitacre's naïve narcissism and lies made his desire to be a heroic whistle-blower go off-key, he still had the tune pretty much right. You leave "The Informant!" laughing and also thinking, thanks not only to Soderbergh's particular, peculiar genius but also thanks to a strange, strong, tragically funny comedy about all the lies we tell ourselves and others to make it through the wicked world and the working week.

James Rocchi's writings on film have appeared at Cinematical.com, Netflix.com, SFGate.com and in Mother Jones magazine. He lives in Los Angeles, where every ending is a twist ending.