The Informant!
Director: Steven Soderbergh
I’m Gonna Explode
Director: Gerardo Naranjo
Inspiration is in disappointingly short supply in The Informant! – a self-consciously larkish adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s book on Mark Whitacre, the biotech scientist who blew the whistle on the shady practices of his employer. As played by a podgy and much de-glamorised Matt Damon, Whitacre comes across as a neurotic, delusional Pooter of the modern corporate world. We’re privy to his interior monologue, which isn’t so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of conscience, as he negotiates some tricky ethical dilemmas with the eager help of the FBI.
Indeed, the disjoint between what we see and what we hear is the chief gimmick of Scott Z Burns’ screenplay. He co-wrote Damon’s secret-agent caper, The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s an in-joke when Whitacre suggests he receive the FBI code-name “0014” because he’s “twice as smart as 007”.
Whitacre isn’t, we soon realise, quite as clever or as self-aware, as he would like to think. And nor is this movie, which bumbles along quite agreeably for a time but starts to fall apart when the extent of Whitacre’s deceptions and evasions (arising, we’re told, from his bipolar mental disorder) becomes fully apparent in the third act.
This kind of material could easily have been played as a topical, serious indictment of corporate turpitude. However, director Steven Soderbergh, making copious use of a gratingly over-the-top score from Marvin Hamlisch and revelling in cheesy period detail goes to considerable pains to make his picture as lightweight and jaunty as possible. . It’s hard to discern much point in The Informant! Apart, perhaps, from giving Matt Damon (who’s perfectly competent in a conspicuously showy role) a chance of a second Oscar to add to the one he got. He’s already got one for co-writing Good Will Hunting. It’s a shame he didn’t get more involved on the screenplay side here.
Neil Young
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There are times when a movie attracts no empathy for its protagonists. I experienced a complete absence of emotional engagement while watching the Mexican doomed romance I’m Gonna Explode. It is not that its teenage hero, Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) is a particularly repellent sociopath, although he does threaten to kill the priests at his private school in the opening scene – which precipitates his expulsion. At his new school, his 15 year-old girlfriend Maru (Maria Deschamps) is a girl who does not fit into any social cliques and falls for a tortured bad boy.
The film, written and directed by Gerardo Naranjo, does have one novel plot twist. Roman runs away with Maru and lives on the roof of his politician father’s house. He sends Papa on a wild goose chase to find him, making use of the opportunity to help himself to food and booze. The pair emerges as bored, self-centred and dull. Roman has not got over the death of his mother, who was killed in a motor accident, and resents his father. Maru sympathises with her mother, but not enough to end the deception.
A more appropriate title would be “I’m gonna implode”, because the drama, in a very real sense, is not going anywhere – although Roman and Maru do attend a party at one point. Roman gets very drunk and Maru experiences a moment of inclusion with other partygoers that suggests that she could find acceptance.
It all ends predictably with gunfire. The audience is supposed to be moved when both lovers arrive at an agreed rendezvous point. Actually, this simply prolongs the inevitable. The central problem is that Roman’s distemper is not challenged within the context of a love story. We either sympathise with his adolescent self-pity or spend two hours being bored. For me, it was the latter.
Patrick Mulcahy
