The Informant!’s Cheerful Portrait of a Liar Feels Out of Date

Steven Soderbergh released two films in 2009. The Girlfriend Experience channeled the “sex” from his initial career-making indie hit. The Informant! leans into the “lies and videotape.” I’d hoped to watch the first, but it remains unavailable on streaming. So I was left with the second—an entertaining, if shallow, exploration of the shallow psychology of white-collar criminals and liars.

The story—based on a nonfiction book by journalist Kurt Eichenwald—centers on Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a scientist turned high-powered executive at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). ADM is involved in a massive conspiracy to fix prices with its competitors, and after Mark reveals the plot to the FBI, he agrees to go undercover as an informer.

Mark demonstrates a real flair for espionage and dissembling—a flair which, it turns out, goes beyond his work for the FBI. Mark lies to everyone about everything—whether that means deceiving friends and colleagues about his family background, lying to himself about his future at ADM, or withholding details of his own massive embezzlement scheme from the federal agents he’s working with.

Damon plays Whitacre as a kind of vacuous corporate chipmunk, blathering empty clichés and glib explanations as he pushes his glasses up his nose and smirks and evades and smirks again. One of the film’s cleverest conceits is a voice-over internal monologue in which we hear the contrast between Whitacre’s public and private self—and the distinction is that private Whitacre is even shallower and more glib than his social façade. As he engages in stressful espionage or is urged by his increasingly desperate FBI handlers to stop lying to them, he nods and smiles and starts talking to himself about how polar bears conceal their black noses so they don’t stand out on the ice, or musing about for-sale fetish panties in Japanese vending machines.

Damon’s performance, and the film as a whole—including its rambunctious jazzy soundtrack—is played for laughs and twists. Every time you think you’ve gotten to Mark’s last lie, another one pops right up like that polar bear nose. This light-hearted approach keeps the movie bumping along, but it also deliberately elides any deeper meaning beyond, “Wow this guy lies all the time.”

A key moment in the film comes near its close, when an FBI agent ask Mark, with a mix of exasperation and disgust, why he won’t stop lying. Mark replies, to himself, “I don’t know.”

The movie toys with the idea that Mark’s problem is psychological—he probably has bipolar disorder, a condition that can lead to manic behavior, including, sometimes, lying. He also seems motivated by greed and by a compulsive self-mythologizing.

All of this is familiar in our current moment when we’re ruled by a greedy lying sociopath. Trump, like Mark, sometimes seems in control of his lies, and then sometimes his lies seem to be in control of him. Both have a gift for refusing to take on information that contradicts their own sense of what they want to be true. Both believe they’re entitled to be believed, and that that entitlement is more important than the trivial line between truth and falsehood.

Mark, though, is mostly treated as a fool; he steals millions, but it’s all paper corporate money. The tone of the movie can be light in part because (outside, perhaps, Mark’s long-suffering wife) there are no innocent victims. Mark’s a sociopath, but his emptiness and callousness cause no real harm that’s dramatized on screen.

Unfortunately, we now all know that narcissistic liars in positions of power aren’t harmless. They’re capable of inflicting staggering cruelty on a wide range of colleagues, enemies, friends, and passersby. It’s unfair to judge Soderbergh’s film by the revelations of a couple of decades later. But you can only watch a film when you watch it, and Informant!’s cheerful tone, in 2026, feels toothless and too blasé.