The Unreliable Movie Guy

There shouldn’t be anything wrong to say about a movie counting on one of Hollywood’s best directors, Steven Soderbergh, a truly inspired Matt Damon and a top story that happened in the world of corporations back in the early ‘90s. So, why this feeling of disappointment as I came out of the theatre, last week? It’s hard to tell, as overall The Informant! is not a bad movie. Yet I can’t help thinking that, giving the high expectations I had, I thought that something had gone wrong, the movie being too long, or boring, which is the same, in the end.

Could it have been different? Probably not, as it so often happens whenever the storyline covers events spanning over a long period of time, a rare exception being Zodiac (2007), by David Fincher. I have always wondered in fact: how is it possible to pretend that the characters, their world and social relations, and their personality would keep a clear consistency throughout events actually happening with long intervals in between? The Informant! is no exception, and as the story goes – telling about over 15 years of the life of Matt Damon’s real character, Mark Whitacre – narrative gaps emerge that make me feel uneasy, and then sceptical, focus getting lost, interest fading away.

That sounds like a misplaced opportunity, as at the beginning, actually, the movie appears brilliant and natural, providing the spectators with extremely interesting insights on corporations’ misbehaviour in the agro-industrial field (but it could have been any kind of business). Moreover, Matt Damon is really inspired, finally ordinary and fat, catchy and funny, while Steven Soderbergh adds a very nice touch, using an elegant style Ocean’s-like clearly recognizable. But, as the protagonist loses his grip on reality, tricked by his own lies, so the spectator gets lost, muttering disappointedly as the closing titles appear: is it possible this was all just about a too loquacious pathological liar?