Sunday Review: The Informant! and Behind the Candelabra

Matt Damon in two by Steven Soderbergh

By Morris Dean

In the last ten days, we've watched four films directed by Steven Soderbergh: the 2011 medical thriller disaster film, Contagion; the 2013 psychological thriller Side Effects, with Jude Law, Rooney Mara, and Catherine Zeta-Jones; Behind the Candelabra (2013); and The Informant! (2009).
    Matt Damon stars in three of these (all but Side Effects) and has appeared prominently in at least three other Soderbergh films—his Ocean's Trilogy of caper comedies: Ocean's Thirteen (2007), and Ocean's Twelve (2004), and Ocean's Eleven (2001), which was a remake of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack's 1960 Ocean's Eleven. We remember the caper comedies as diversions and barely remember that Matt Damon was in them at all—of course, he had lots of competition for the camera—George Clooney, Andy García, Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, and Carl Reiner were in all of them, Julia Roberts in two, and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Ellen Barken in one each.

Matt Damon also has competition in Behind the Candelabra—Michael Douglas in convincing make-up and voice and drag as the sequin-bedecked pianist Liberace (1919-1987), possibly to be his most memorable role. Damon plays 17-to-27-year-old bisexual Scott Thorson, on whose book, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace (1988), the movie is based. (I have not read the book.)
    The movie was filmed in thirty days, for HBO, so we don't suppose that Damon's weight gain performing Thorson's life of dissipated houseboy was owing to diet. Definitely not a comic role, but Douglas's Liberace is decidedly comic despite the character's pathos—Liberace seems ever to have been the showman, ever on—even at home and in the boudoir.

The real glitter

    Despite Douglas's glittery performance, I don't think we're going to have any trouble remembering Matt Damon either. In fact, while watching him in Behind the Candelabra we realized that we just HAD to watch The Informant! again, and we did last night.

Of all of Matt Damon's performances to date, my personal favorite is his portrayal in The Informant! of Mark Whitacre's involvement as a whistle blower at global food-processing and commodities-trading corporation Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the lysine price-fixing conspiracy of the mid-1990s.

The real informant

   As serious a situation as everyone thought Whitacre was in—including the FBI, the U.S. Attorney General, besieged executives at ADM, and Mrs. Whiteacre—Damon's portrayal is a bravura comic performance of bipolar manic meltdown. As the judge near the end of the film observes, "It is very difficult to tell when Mr. Whitacre is telling the truth."

Matt as Mark, for which role his
weight gain was real

   By the way, the judge is played by Dick Smothers, and Tom Smothers has a small role as well (remember The Smothers Brothers?), along with eight other stand-up comedians; all are listed in the Wikipedia article. Note, however, that none of their roles is played for comedy; in fact, "comic" may not even be the right word to describe Damon's performance. It's more that Whiteacre's double-crossing excesses were just so over-the-top as to be incredible, and breathtaking in their audacity—that someone could be an undercover informant for the FBI and at the same time be embezzling millions from the company he was informing on.
    It's possible, if you have followed Ira Glass's radio program This American Life over the years, that you have already heard about the lysine price-fixing shenanigans at Archer Daniels Midland. Glass did a show on it ("The Fix Is In," September 15, 2000), right after journalist Kurt Eichenwald's nonfiction book The Informant was published—and while Mark Whiteacre was still in prison.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

Please comment