Steven Soderbergh’s THE INFORMANT (2009) is a based-on-truth film though the opening blithely warns us the director’s not prioritizing accuracy. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland executive who cooperated with FBI Agent Shepard (Scott Bakula) to expose the company’s massive price-fixing operations. As he explains it, he started out in the tech end, got bumped up to management and isn’t comfortable with it.
Public-spirited? Maybe. Then again, he tells his wife that this might open up opportunities in the hierarchy if anyone above him gets busted. And then it turns out that while working with the FBI he also launched several million-dollar scams and kickbacks to line his own pocket. And even before that, he made up stuff, like his tragic family history. Soderbergh doesn’t go deep or try to pin down Whitacre’s motives (he does dismiss out of hand the idea his bipolar illness was responsible), treating this more like the kind of “you won’t believe this story” you might tell a friend over coffee. Well-done. “Everyone in the country is a victim of corporate crime by the time they finish breakfast.”
Soderbergh’s next film, CONTAGION (2011), now looks almost creepily prescient post-covid. We have a disease that jumps from bats to pigs to humans, then explodes across the globe, spawning terror, grief, death, and also masking, social distancing, paranoid conspiracy theories and anti-vax hucksters. It’s also, from what I’ve read, accurate in its portrayal of how things work (or worked at the time — god knows what things look like under RFK Jr.), though one doctor said no way does the CDC get real-time information this quickly (and based on reading for Watching Jekyll and Hyde about self-experimentation, one doctor testing a vaccine on herself shouldn’t speed things up that much). Very good and well cast: Laurence Fishbourne as the head of the CDC, Gwyneth Paltrow as an adulterous Patient Zero, Matt Damon as her shellshocked husband, Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet as doctors and Jude Law as an Alex Jones-style huckster. “Clearly we’re not lucky.”
Warners almost buried COYOTE VS. ACME (2026) in the studio vaults which would have been a great shame — and a great mistake, as it’s proving a solid hit for them. Fed up with decades of Acme products that boomerang on him, Wiley Coyote hires attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to sue them. Avery is a schmuck who’d happily settle rather than take on the world’s biggest corporation and its ruthless legal team headed by Buddy Crane (John Cena). However as events progress it becomes obvious Acme is engaged in very shady business and Avery slowly realizes he’s not willing to walk away. This was a delightful, fun movie and offered some great Easter eggs (“Let’s go to our news team in Guadalajara, where a mouse just broke the sound barrier!”). Well worth seeing if you find the time. “Pursuant to Sylvester v. Gonzalez, ‘chase by predator’ is an occupation under the law.”
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