I just saw the film The Informant! labeled a dark comedy, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Matt Damon, based on the 2000 non-fiction book by the same name by journalist Kurt Eichenwald. It tells the story of a bumbling whistleblower who takes on the management of the giant agribusiness corporation he works for, but who is too naive and too compromised by his own complicity in the corporate game to succeed. Indeed, at the end of the movie he ends up in jail.
I often find fiction films more inspiring than documentaries when it comes to structure, style and texture, and this is one example. ( Another fairly recent one, which I loved for the style of shooting and editing, was Enemy of the State.) You can learn an awful lot from watching The Informant! about the amount of complexity a film can handle, about character development and ‘narrative economy’ and about a creative and entertaining way to convey the thoughts of the main character.
In addition, I have a long-standing interest in the role and fate of whistleblowers who play a key role in the fight for accountability and democracy. I sometimes discuss these issues with the Executive director of FAIR ( The Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform) David Hutton.
David has this to say about The Informant! :
“Yes I did see the movie, and it was very entertaining. However, although Mark Whitacre helps expose a massive corporate fraud, he turns out to be a delusional fraudster trying to cover his own tracks with layer upon layer of untruths. This makes him completely unlike any whistleblower that I know.
The common characteristic that I have found among whistleblowers is personal integrity. They are ordinary people whose personal values simply would not allow them to collude in wrongdoing that would harm others. So they feel compelled to speak out even though this puts their own careers at risk. Even when their careers have been ruined, they often express no regrets, saying that they felt they had no choice but to do what they did. So in my mind the word ‘whistleblower’ is synonymous with ‘truth-teller’. Thank goodness that there are so many of them: they typically pay dearly for their courage, but the world would be a poorer and more dangerous place without them.”
The personal crises typical of the whistleblower experience are well rendered in another Soderbergh film, Erin Brockowich, one whose strength lies more in the writing and in the performances than in the visual treatment. Brockovich, as played by Julia Roberts, gets so caught up in her inquiry into corporate wrongdoing that she starts neglecting her children and her lover. When she receives a threatening phone call, it leads to increased stress and separation. The personal crisis theme is even more developed in The Insider, where Jeff Wigand (played by Russell Crowe) is subjected to all manner of blackmail,threats, intimidation and violence, with disastrous consequences for his family life. Again, the story line of The Insider stayed very close to the real life story, as told in the Vanity Fair article on which the film was based.
Thanks to Jessica Berglund and David Hutton for help with this post.
