ยป The Informant!
I love the exclamation point in the title. It fits perfectly.
Damon plays a lovable head-case “do-good” whistleblower.
There’s a very cool mechanic the movie uses — the food science and additive business can be, let’s face it, pretty dull. When Damon’s character starts divulging facts that’ll lose the audience a voice-over kicks in with little factoids obliquely related to the plot. So he’ll be discussing lysine but we’ll be hearing a story about, say, polar bears.
It works well, and more important they actually bring the VO home in a final melancholic “he’s cornered” scene. The unreliable narrator turns out to be desperately mentally ill while still retaining his “awww shucks” charm.
The movie gets on a good wratch about white collar crime, climaxing in an effective quip. Roughly:
Rob one grocery store and you get five years. Rob every grocery store in the world and you get three.
Unfortunately one message of the picture seems to be “do the right thing and your life will be destroyed.” Oh well, might as well tell people the truth.
[Oh, and it ends with epilogue cards, kinda. These worked for me though, I think because they were actually surtitles running over filmed versions of the events described and not just static cards.]


