I’m cheating big time here, but I really don’t feel like writing 800-1000 words on each of these two movies. Nobody’s paying me, so sue me. In the words of philosopher Eric Cartman: “Whateva. I do what I want!”
The Informant!
Whether you buy The Informant! or not depends entirely on the performance of Matt Damon. In my opinion, it is a good one, and he carries what might have been an uninteresting movie and makes it a terrific look inside a man who, under the guise of telling the truth, actually has his own agenda.
Most people would direct this film as a self-serious corporate thriller, Insider-style. Instead screenwriter Scott Burns and director Steven Soderbergh decide to go a more farcical route and it pays off, for the most part. The musical score by Marvin Hamlisch can be a bit grating, as if asking you “Har har, ain’t this a riot?”
Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a high-ranking executive at Archer Daniels Midland, a lysine developing company based in Illinois. Whitacre decides to become an FBI informant so that he may expose the company’s price-fixing tactics, which is odd because he’s making a ton of money BECAUSE of the price-fixing. Nonetheless he continues to provide information to the FBI that brings the company down; that is until the truth is revealed about Whitacre.
Damon’s performance is remarkable because Whitacre first appears to be a funny little man who is in over his head, but starting at about halfway through the film layer after layer is peeled back until we see the person that he really is, and it’s not even close. Perhaps the choice of Soderbergh to make the movie with this tone is the reason we buy every shift in the plotline. A more serious movie might have made the revelations appear to be cheap plot twists.
One of the more interesting choices Soderbergh makes, if not genius, is the casting of stand-up comedians and sitcom stars in nearly all the supporting roles. The FBI agents are played by Joel McHale (Community, which is now my favorite sitcom on television) and Scott Bakula, while the likes of Tom Papa (currently host of The Marriage Ref), Tony Hale (Arrested Development), and Patton Oswalt all appear as well. The strangest part is that they are all playing the straight men to Damon’s main character. Most of them don’t stay around long enough for an impact, positive or negative, but Joel McHale actually impresses here. In the past year he’s gone from Mr. “Ain’t I a stinker?” on The Soup to a legitimate actor.
Matt Damon is pretty much the entire movie here, but that is not a wholly bad thing. The whole 60’s spy movie color scheme and musical score is a bit over-the-top, but Damon alone and the mostly fascinating story makes it very much worth seeing.
Rating:
(out of 4)The Road
Without a doubt The Road is the grayest movie I’ve ever seen. This turns out to not only be true about the color palette, but the tone of the film as well. Cormac McCarthy, the author whose novel this film was based on, is historically a bit of a gloomy Gus, and the last adaptation that made it to the screen (the brilliant No Country for Old Men) was made the right way to fit the pessimistic plot. What a film like this needs is the wit the Coen brothers brought to No Country. Instead what The Road offers is a dreary, self-important experience.
I have not read the novel at this time, though I intend to. It likely works better in literary form, and probably could have made a great movie in the right hands. Instead directing duties were given to John Hillcoat, a music video director who decides to hit the same dreary notes again and again for nearly two hours. I grew bored after a while, and the absolute commitment to every color in the frame being a different shade of gray was tiresome. Very early on we get the main character teaching his son how to shoot himself. What a wonderful world.
While I hated the style it was made in, I liked most of the performances. Viggo Mortensen is quite good as the father who leads his son toward the west coast across a post-Apocalyptic America. Even more impressive is Kodi Smit-McPhee as his son, a character who exhibits all the emotions a child of his age probably would. Robert Duvall shows up two-thirds of the way through and turns in a subtle, memorable part as an old traveler. Most of the other characters are redneck mechanics, apparently the only profession that can survive the apocalypse.
The plot is pretty identical to Zombieland, an incredibly enjoyable comedic romp through a zombie apocalypse. Now one must imagine that movie with all of the fun drained out of it, and here we have “The Road”. This is what I call a “fake Oscar movie”: one released during the fall season to fool the world into maybe throwing a golden statue or two their way. There’s a few every year, and “The Road” was a prime example from last year. There’s some merit here, but this a missed opportunity of mammoth proportions.
Rating:
(out of 4)
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