A tale of corporate corruption meets personal conviction, Steven Soderberg's The Informant! is a film that joins a fairly significant body of others that has sought to turn the suspense of high-level whistle-blowing into boxoffice gold. Sporting an Oscar-baiting amount of excess weight to play an agri-giant corporate executive turned undercover FBI informant, Matt Damon's Mark Whitacre makes no attempt to hide the fact that he likens his double life to that of the heroic men in The Insider, The Firm, and pretty much any movie with Bond in the title. However, quickly revealing Whitacre to be a bit less debonair than Bond, significantly less honest than Abe, and much more like a character from last year's Burn After Reading, The Informant! reveals a character actually quite different from almost every whistle-blowing drama that has come before it.

Beginning when Mark Whitacre decides to spill the beans regarding price-fixing going on in the corn industry, The Informant! is pretty much a film that just keeps pulling back layer after layer of corruption as its story goes on. What makes it different than most other films, however, is that more of the corruption revealed originates with Whitacre instead of with the company itself. And while the relative lack of suspense or intrigue contained within the increasing revelations brought to light make for a story that never really brings you to the edge of your seat, as you sit and ponder the man and the motivations behind the strange web in which we come to find Whitacre, what you see is at the very least an intriguing portrait of flawed humanity.

A bit like a comic version of Michael Clayton, at the center of The Informant! are lies upon lies people simply refuse to let go of. In every office from Whitacre's to FBI headquarters is the opposing force of truth depicted in portraits, drawings, and full-scale busts of Honest Abe himself. From the beginning of the film, everyone from Whitacre's wife (Melanie Lynskey) to FBI agents Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale) is there to remind Whitacre that the only way to make things right is to tell the entire truth. But as Whitacre continues to reveal, he simply cannot seem to do that. And it is through that reasoning (or lack of it) that we see a dangerous pit that waits not just for bumbling corporate executives trying to save their 401(k)s, but for any of us who have ever had trouble letting go of the idea that we are the White Knight.

Sure, many of us may generally recognize that lying is wrong. We have come to understand that when one lie is told, it will very often pull us into a web of even greater lies needed to uphold the first. But what The Informant! challenges us with are the lies we keep on telling because to our left or to our right we find a rock hard reason for their perpetration. As Whitacre shows us, perhaps the easiest excuse to fall back onto time and time again is the belief that we are performing a task for the greater good. The flawed logic that follows: the notion that under such a banner wrongs may be required to make a right. And the reality that is more often than not the truth: that very often we only end up perpetrating those wrongs and weaving those lies for our own greater good.

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