The guy sitting in front of me at this screening of The Informant! was so bored with the film and so full of himself that the spent nearly the whole movie checking Facebook and sending text messages from his Blackberry.  His friends were chatting so incessantly that the couple sitting in front of them got up and moved to a different row.  At one point, Captain Text Message actually put his feet up over the back of the chair in front of him, despite the fact that someone was sitting in the adjacent seat.  I am not sure how much of this behavior colored my feelings about the film, but it was all certainly distracting.  With a movie like this, it's easy to get distracted and with so many moments where I was taken out of the film to fantasize about slapping this guy with a 2x4, I feel like I probably didn't have a chance to get into it.  I've heard the movie described as one of the funniest movies of the year, and I can see how it might play like that with the right audience but it's a movie that requires some investment.

Right from the get-go, Steven Soderbergh is telling you that the movie may be based on the true story of Mark Whitacre, but it is still going to be a bit of a farce.   The music throughout the film reinforces this idea, taking most of the drama and suspense out of the story and replacing it with what you might call slow-burning comedy.  If Michael Mann's similarly themed film The Insider winds up being a little too stark and serious, this movie takes the opposite approach by playing everything with a healthy dose of disblieving humor.  Most of the characters in the film aside from the the titular protagonist have either a moment where they stare in utter astonishment and the proceedings (some characters maintain this look anytime they are on screen,) and it makes for a strange and funny approach at times.  Usually the audience is meant to identify with the protagonist, but in these moments where people stare at Matt Damon's character mouth agape with big, buggy eyes, we are clearly meant to identify with the characters in the periphery.  The story is unbelievable, and there are quite a few points where the best joke on the screen is simply someone's reaction to what Matt Damon is saying.

I loved the bits where Whitacre himself lost interest in the story and just dropped into some anecdotal aside.  I think we might have missed some of the inner workings of the corporate espionage that drives the plot, but Soderbergh makes it clear that the mechanics of agribusiness aren't what his film is about.  In fact, none of the film is ever driven by a clear sense of right and wrong.  We always get the sense that while Whitacre is driven to 'do the right thing' that something about him isn't quite right.  As the story unfolds and we see just how 'not right' he really is, the movie really loses sight of the ethical issue that appeared to set the plot in motion and it focuses instead on how nutty Whitacre is.  The Informant! is a strange movie--one that gives the audience plenty of time step out for popcorn or wander aimlessly away from the action for a while.  It could probably be half an hour shorter without losing much, but Soderbergh seems intent on making sure that his protagonist has enough rope.  In the right context, this could build to a hilarious finish, but in the wrong one it might just seem a little boring.