‘The Informant!,’ Steven Soderbergh’s wildly unique corporate crime film, turns 15

Matt Damon was cast against type as an overweight, mentally ill corporate whistleblower.

There’s one thing in particular that I’ve always appreciated about The Informant!,” director Steven Soderbergh’s drama that arrived in September of 2009, 15 years ago this week: The film is based on a true story that could very easily have been turned into a standard, straightforward corporate thriller, and still been pretty good. 

Instead, Soderbergh took a completely different approach, meant to convey the story's inherent weirdness, the main character's mental illness, and how the story and his schemes spun out of control. 

Based on a nonfiction book by Kurt Eichenwald and written by Scott Z. Burns, The Informant! is set in the early 1990s and focuses on a real-life corporate scandal in the Midwest. 

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), a multinational corporation in the food business, was engaged in an international conspiracy to fix the prices of the food additive lysine. Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) was a mid-level corporate executive who blew the whistle on the scheme, becoming an FBI informant supervised by two agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale). 

We get early hints that something’s a bit off about Whitacre- he seems to change minor details of stories, and more than that, his voice-over narration features lots of stories and anecdotes that seem to have nothing to do with the plot. Also, he appears under the impression that after snitching on the company to the government and likely putting several of his colleagues in jail, he’ll be able to continue his career at the company and possibly even end up running it. 

Eventually, it becomes clear not only that Whitacre has some degree of mental illness but that he’d also been stealing millions of dollars from the company under the nose of both his colleagues and the FBI. At least until it’s no longer tenable, he's supported by his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey.)