Seller Steven


Posted by Admin

Seller Steven

Seller Steven

On the surface, if it had been made 30 years ago, Mark Whitacre, the Matt Damon character in Steven Soderbergh’s newest film The Informant, would have been played by Peter Sellers in the same vein as his lovably goofy and bumbling characters from such timeless comedies as The Pink Panther or The Party.

Just like a Seller’s classic, Whitacre, stumbles his way into a corporate whistle-blowing scheme in which he informs to the FBI that his high powered company Archer Daniel Midland is in the business of meeting with competitors in the Lysine market to fix the prices.

Whitacre, a top ranking employee with what would appear to be a guilty conscious, thus begins helping the FBI gather hours of tapes and recordings of top ADM execs in incriminating meetings.

Unlike Insp. Jacques Clouseau though there is more to the story than meets the eye: Whitacre is not simply so morbidly incompetent that he trips on top of success in the end. The real life Whitacre spent seven years in jail for being caught skimming some odd nine million dollars out of the company while the investigation was going on, but that this very man managed to even get that far is still a small kind of success unto itself.

Soderberg's Comic Tone

It’s just right then that Soderbergh approaches this story with a deftly off-centre comic tone because a) the story, based somewhat on a true one, is so obscenely outlandish that comedy is a natural fit, but b) it’s important the audience like this mook Whitacre because, unlike a Seller’s character, there are other, far more complex circumstances lurking below the surface and hearts therefore go out to him in the end when the true motives behind his actions slowly begin to reveal themselves. Whitacre is not even close to being a bad guy and because of that his story slowly reveals itself as somewhat of a tragedy.

Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre

The main crux of the film then is a bloated, toupeed, mustached Matt Damon who does a masterful job of making Whitacre something you’d expect to find in a classic screwball comedy, living in his plush house, loving his perky wife and their kids, being an important, high salaried part of his company, etc. but also portraying a darker, more seething energy that lurks just below the surface.