..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Images from 9 ..9 Trailer ..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

The Informant! and Love Happens
and Disgrace

This week’s slate of new movies offers two lead performances that really rank among the year’s best: Matt Damon‘s pathologically self-deluded whistle blower in Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! and John Malkovich’s erotically-inclined but ill-fated South African literature professor, who plunges into a personal hell in Steve Jacobs’ and Anna Maria Monticelli‘s film of J. M. Coetzee‘s novel, Disgrace.
     
Neither performance seems likely right now to be up strongly for an Oscar next year, since neither film seems likely to be a big audience hit. But both deserve strong applause and high recognition. Nothing yet on Jennifer's Body, which I‘ll catch later, but Love Happens is a good-hearted but blandly unoriginal romantic comedy/drama, co-starring Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart, as a saucy florist and a bereaved  bestseller writer, but stolen by a cockatoo. 

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The Informant! (Three Stars)
U.S.; Steven Soderbergh, 2009

Matt Damon plays a real-life whistle blower in Steven Soderbergh’s semi-fictionalized The Informant! But it’s a character who’s really fictionalized himself: Mark Whitacre, a bio-chemical division executive at agricultural mega-corporation Archer Daniels Midland, who starts working with the FBI in the ‘90s, after he reveals (or claims) to his bosses that a corporate mole for a Japanese rival has infiltrated the company. That’s only the beginning of Mark’s odd exposures. After ADM brings in the FBI to investigate, Mark tells them that ADM itself is deeply involved itself in price-fixing and corruption, and then wears a wire for the Feds to record hundreds of sometimes incriminating conversations with his fellow execs. But, as we keep learning, there’s more to Mark than experimenting with corn or blowing whistles.

I liked Soderbergh gutsily uncommercial Che, if not his pretentiously pseudo-erotic The Girlfriend Experience, and I’m not unreceptive to the Ocean series. But, as advertised this is Soderbergh’s best movie in a while. It connects with the audience in all sorts of weird and entertaining ways: as thriller, comedy, satire, and expose. And the fact that Damon plays Mark so lightly and humorously -- like a dorkier riff on his psychopathic deceiver Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley -- and that he’s backed by cast full of standup comics (including The Smothers Brothers as a CEO and a judge), insure that we’ll look at everything here with a mix of amusement and skepticism. Just as we should for his increasingly incredible maneuvers.

The kicker: All the while Mark is helping spy on his own company, he’s also fiddling with money, embezzling and robbing ADM of millions, while concealing or lying about his own chicanery (though not about the company’s corruption) to his FBI contacts -- whom he later lies about as well. Mark isn’t exaggerating about his bosses‘ price-fixing; several went to jail. But he’s committing crimes of his own s as he helps gather evidence against them -- and he later tries to justifies his thievery as the “business as usual” at ADM, taught to him by others.

When Mark’s deceptions begin to spill out, falling askew like his bad toupee, and when his well-manicured, affluent Decatur Il. suburban life -- complete with doting, mousy wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) begins to unravel, the movie gives full vent to its light-fingered, darkly comic vein. “I’m the good guy!” Mark keeps insisting, and evidently he buys it on some level, nursing absurd delusions about taking over Archer Daniels Midland some day after the whole thing is over, and everyone else is in jail or disgraced.

On some level, that’s obviously what he feels. The movie, written by Scott Z. Burns (of An Inconvenient Truth) is narrated by Damon’s Mark, and his free-associating babble (at one point, he starts musing disapprovingly about Japanese men buying school girls‘ used panties -- reveals a mind so lost in its own private deceits and fantasies, it can’t, or won’t, come up for air.

Damon plays the part beautifully, better than he did Ripley. Overweight, bespectacled, toupeed and full of instant affability and “gee whiz” pseudo-sincerity, he gives us, as many have mentioned, something like a comic version of Russell Crowe‘s pudgy, anguished whistle-blower in The Insider, but without the anguish. At first, Mark seems a likable but nerdy straight arrow scientist-out-of-water type, who’s fallen into a culture of corporate greed and duplicity. Eventually, he seems one of the biggest greed-crazed corporate creeps in the bunch. And, since the movie is based, at least partly, on real events (an opening crawl admits that some of the movie is made up too), we can’t help but draw the obvious conclusion that the corporate culture itself is pathological. Somehow, it nurtured both Mark and the people he sold out.

Soderbergh has directed both offbeat art films, and big-budget star vehicles, and this movie is somewhere between the two. It’s a star vehicle for Damon, but it’s also arty and wry and subversive. Soderbergh keeps irony intact and tongue well in cheek throughout. And, playing Mark’s contact, FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard, Scott Bakula gives us the perfect, upright, often dumfounded straight man to Damon’s comic psychopath.
When Mark is revealed as a liar, when his psychic toupee slips and the lies begin to mount up, Bakula’s expressions of reined-in shock and befuddlement almost suggest he‘s about to get a mental hernia. Trying to keep up with the staggering heaps of bull Mark is dispensing leaves this case-hardened agent, and us, amazed. Mark is a whistleblower. He is exposing corruption in a major, omnipresent corn-into-cash corporation. But, unlike his fantasy image of himself, he‘s no good guy.

Of course, many whistle-blowers may have personal motivations or gripes. But so what? At least the whistles get blown. The Informant! -- which is based on Kurt Eichenwald’s serious reportage and book -- is fairly unique in presenting a secret-buster more devious, and just as corrupt, as the crooks he’s exposing. Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns (of An Inconvenient Truth) and Damon guide us through all this with smarts and panache, turning Mark into a half-crazy mole in the slick corporate dung heap.

All the while, Soderbergh seems to having a lot of fun here, and so does the cast. Soderbergh gives the whole movie a gleaming, slightly head-achy, something-rotten-in-suburbia look, aided by the fact that Informant’s cinematographer, “Peter Andrews” is the director‘s usual alter ego. Meanwhile, the cast of comics and comedically-inclined actors keeps the mood buoyant. This movie won’t be the crowd-pleaser that Soderbergh’s other corporate-corruption tale, Erin Brockovich was. But it sure pleased me. 

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Love Happens (Two Stars)
U.S.; Brandon Camp, 2009

Here’s a middling romantic comedy with a heavy dose of melancholy, about a self-help bestseller writer -- Aaron Eckhart as Burke Ryan, who writes on how to cope with their grief at the loss of loved ones, although he’s still fairly shattered and secretive about the death of his own wife in a car accident. In Seattle for a series of lectures and workshops, Burke runs across a very fetching florist, Eloise, played by Jennifer Aniston with hair blazing, and he succumbs to her charms -- which include a penchant for long obscure words and a talent for playing deaf.

This new dating spree is important. It‘s the highly successful writer‘s first, we’re told in the three years since his wife‘s death -- one of many plot twists pretty damned hard to swallow.

The movie, directed and written by Brandon Camp, son of the Benji series’ Joe, is divided into the grief workshop scenes, which are schmaltzy (dominated by John Carroll Lynch as a stricken ex-contractor), and the romance, which is schmaltzy and cutesy -- but decorated with lots of gorgeous bouquets from floral purveyor Teleflora. (Teleflora‘s engaging Flower Blog, by the way, is written by a good friend of mine, blog-named Jacqueline. And that company should really use this sparkling writer’s absolutely gorgeous countenance in a head-shot for the blog. I guarantee it would immediately mean a big jump in readership. Listening, Teleflora?)

Anyway, Aniston and Eckhart hold the camera, but without much pizzazz this time out. There’s one funny performance in the movie: Dan Fogler (whom I unfairly dissed as a Jack Black wanna-be in Fanboys) as Burke‘s oily, conniving but basically nice-guy manager Lane -- not much of a part, but done with some flash and wit.

So the aforementioned cockatoo really does steal the movie, along with some help at the end from Martin Sheen, playing the mostly thankless role of Burke‘s upset-with-him dad-in-law. Father and son’s last encounter, a public tear-drenched rally tries vainly to elevate the schmaltz to something new. Megaschmaltz? Anyway, you’ll probably like the flowers and the cockatoo. And Seattle. And maybe Fogler. Jack Black, watch your back.

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Disgrace (Three Stars)
Australia; Steve Jacobs, 2008

The second major performance of the week: John Malkovich, who’s a wizard at playing pretentious, arrogant and diffident, is brilliant here again, in a more typical art film than The Informant! Working with a finely-hewn, very intelligent script, based on South African writer J. M. Coetzee‘s novel, Malkovich plays a cultivated, erotically-inclined Cape Town South African professor of literature (romantic poetry, with an emphasis on Lord Byron), whose affair with a young black female student eventually disgraces him, loses him his job and sends him out to the Eastern Cape farm and dog kennel of his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines, almost as good as Malkovich here) -- where even worse humiliations and more intense suffering await him.

Disgrace, based on a Coetzee novel that won the Booker Prize, and itself a winner of the FIPRESCI Jury Prize at Toronto, is in many ways a model literary adaptation, though it’s only the second feature from its talented husband-wife director-producer/screenwriter team, Steve Jacobs and Anna Maria Monticelli. They’ve done a careful, loving job. The film is lyrically photographed (by Steve Arnold) in Cape Town and in stunning mountain settings and superbly acted -- by Malkovich and Haines, and by Eriq Ebouaney as Lucy‘s sly, ambitious neighbor Petrus.

Towering over the movie though is Malkovich‘s Lurie, a selfish, condescending man who both receives his comeuppance and goes through such floods of torment that he compels both our belief and our sadness. And our recognition of all the pains and vicissitudes, present and past, of a country where the suffering apparently continues.

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs


- Michael Wilmington
September 17, 2009

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