Release Date: September 18, 2009

(out of 4)

Matt Damon is at his best when he’s in disguise, not necessarily a hair and make-up disguise, but a disguise as to his true motives driving his actions. If you think about the characters he’s played, from Jason Bourne to Tom Ripley to Colin Sullivan (let us recall regretfully he was not Oscar nominated for “The Departed”), Damon is top drawer when he plays guys whose real selves are invisible to the world. In his new film “The Informant!” Damon gets a mustache and a hair piece for his character, but he goes beyond the make-up to create a memorably vexed character with compartmentalized layers. Damon is playing yet another one of those deceptive and secretive guys as Mark Whitacre, a vice president at ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), a corporation involved in corn flavoring in mass food products.

In “The Informant!” (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title), we learn that corn syrup and other corn-related extracts are used as additives in everything such as in tofu, in cola, and even select meat products especially persuasive in fast food chains. Whitacre becomes a whistle-blower who cooperates with the FBI not because ADM practices anything remotely controversial (corn flavoring is the American Way) but because ADM is responsible in price fixing. While Scott Z. Burns script is often brilliant in terms of zingy dialogue and snack-worthy asides, there is never an in-depth analysis as to what price fixing actually is. But I’ll tell you. It’s when the Americans, and Japanese, and Swiss (well maybe, maybe not) get together in secret to price gouge the consumer with unjustified cost increases.

But how about those asides and diversions with Whitacre. Throughout the film, Whitacre has blustery conversations with himself, heard in voice-over, that has nothing to do with what’s happening on-screen. Whitacre could be at an appointment with the FBI, or producing contracts, and he will muse about what if they made a television show about a man who chases himself, or how about those Oscar de la Renta ties at discount outlets that are just diagonal stripes are just too plain and unfashionable. The interior monologues are oddly comical, so unwired to the surface proceedings that it’s funny.

But getting inside Whitacre’s head turns out to be essential to the story. Let’s be reminded that this is based on a true story that is set during the mid-90’s and based on a non-fiction bestseller by Kurt Eichenwald (not read by me but I wonder if it’s funny). The film, directed by Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic,” “Ocean’s Eleven”), starts in the kind of dramatic fashion of a whistle-blower docudrama that feels similar, say, to “The Insider” with Russell Crowe. This might sound like an obscure reference, but Damon’s Whitacre character is more akin to Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Owning Mahoney” than to the former said film with Crowe.

Here’s this Whitacre guy who cooperates with the FBI, gets his colleague in hot water by getting them to admit corporate misconduct on wiretap, but manages to lie to not only to ADM but the FBI. Details to what happens is better left unsaid, but as the story unravels it all makes sense. And on a more serious note, reputations are irreversibly damaged. Whitacre, with his whatever works mentality, is clueless as to the harm he’s causing to snare individuals whom are to a degree blameless. Will the FBI retract their mistakes and correct its errors?

What doesn’t make sense is Soderbergh’s peculiar aesthetic of 70’s movie cheesiness – the font type in the credits, the swirly romantic music by Marvin Hamlisch, the yellow-brown color palette. None of it feels like it truly belongs in this 90’s story. Nevertheless the film has a certain self-assured craft and Soderbergh as always is on top of his zig-zag narrative. But all the conference room meetings gets tiring by the third act, and it’s not impossible to wonder if the film could have wrapped up sooner than it does. But if anything, the success of the movie is due to Matt Damon who has made a career playing unlikely wild cards. There is always more than meets the eye with him.