Reports are in from the Venice Film Festival on Steven Soderbergh’s black comedy, “The Informant!” starring Matt Damon and most reviews seem to be largely positive.
While no one seems to be doing backflips over it either, some suggesting it’s a little lightweight — at least compared to most Soderbergh ventures of late — it seems like the film is largely amusing and winning over critics.
Variety: “The wacky little brother of ‘Erin Brokovich,’ ‘The Informant!’ goofs around lightheartedly while still doing some justice to the true-life story of a zealous but wildly delusional corporate whistle-blower. A larky outing for director Steven Soderbergh after the somber rigors of ‘Che’ and ‘The Girlfriend Experience,’ the pic showcases an excellent performance by a chubbed-out Matt Damon as a Midwestern executive who’s so smart he’s dumb. Amusingly eccentric rather than outright funny, this Warner Bros. release will have to rely mostly on Damon for its B.O., which looks to be modest.
THR says Sodbergh throws subtlety aside and goes for big laughs which is OK with them. “Without that punctuation, this tale of corporate skullduggery, embezzlement, wiretaps, a whistle-blower and mental illness would be either a sweaty-palm thriller or a gritty character study about matters of conscience in corporate America. But that exclamation point changes everything. It’s a comedy! And Matt Damon is playing a Tom Ripley without any smarts — or at least without any instinct for self-preservation.”
ScreenDaily is perhaps the one “negative” review and says the picture can’t decide what its going for tonally. “Far more serious than either the broad trailer campaign or the exclamation mark in its title would indicate, the film can’t quite decide its tone, and a razzle-dazzle comedy score from Marvin Hamlisch – his first movie music since 1996 – doesn’t help settle the matter, especially since the best moments are intensely dramatic.”
London Times: On paper, it seems like a singularly uncinematic story: an FBI investigation into price fixing within an agri-industrial giant that is based on the co-operation and testimonial of a spectacularly unreliable, key witness. It plays out in a series of featureless conference rooms in which men in expensively bland suits discuss production quotas of amino acids. But somehow, through sheer force of will from the director, Steven Soderbergh, and star, Matt Damon, every last drop of comic drama has been industrially extracted from the material.
Empire: “With a sparky, cocktail-jazzy score and a big dash of ‘Petulia’-era Richard Lester melancholy…. because though it’s set in the ’90s midwest, it could easily be the ’70s, a time explicitly evoked in the music and the typefaces that pop up throughout.” Soderbergh is a big R. Lester fan, so this Brit review might be on to something here.
InContention calls it a, “flip, frisky entertainment that may well represent the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation.”
“The Informant” hits theaters on September 18.