The Informant! has taken its share of criticism for not being Michael Clayton or The Insider or Wall Street or even Soderbergh’s own Erin Brockovich—dramas that don’t find corporate fraud and exploitation, not to mention bipolar disorder, so amusing. The New York Press remarked, “There’s no humanity to relate to, no wit to laugh at, only chuckling at one’s own sense of superiority.” (I would argue that we don’t stand at such a distance from the joke.) Even a majority of the good reviews, and there are many, averted criticism by conceding the point: categorizing The Informant! as a piece of sharp filmmaking, a zany caper akin to Catch Me if You Can. Both criticism and praise miss the point—

--Which is something closer to a summary, offered as sharp criticism in a review that was mostly just disappointed The Informant! wasn’t The Insider, in the East Bay Express: “Mark’s big-business shenanigans peter out anticlimactically over the course of six or seven years and that’s that.” Yes. It’s disarming. It cuts down greed and power in a way that stories about heroes and villains cannot. Because smart as they might be, the grand polemics too often grant those heroes and villains tremendous weight, and so too, a romantic quality that rings absolutely false. Here, the shady corporate executives are oafs in tacky suits; the elite FBI investigators hot on their trail are something like over-earnest and underfunded nonprofit employees up against forces too comically big to change; their agency is more interested in the Byzantine details of what it can, rather than what it ought to prosecute. There is no high drama in this corporate intrigue, no seriousness of purpose for the executives making millions or the sleuths in noble pursuit of the public interest. It’s men playing at inane jobs, the sum total of which is an amoral system that warps the winners and rips off the losers in the face of comically impotent justice.

The Informant! robs the drama of the allure that too often tarnishes stories about the “Masters of the Universe,” a phrase that not only makes the stomach turn for granting power to idiots, but that also feels discordant, on a fundamental level, with the way the world works. The Informant! as absurd comedy achieves an unsettling realism. Isn’t it wonderful that the glib comedy, amongst an entire academy category’s worth of serious dramas, comes closest to being the documentary? See also: Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room.

In response to charges of flippancy, it seems unfair not to at least grant Soderbergh—director of three art-house movies on this common theme—some seriousness of intent. So consider as evidence the comedic ramblings of Mark Whitacre: Throughout the course of the movie, over images of him walking stiffly in his too-big suit, he delivers non-sequitor musings in dead-pan voiceover. It’s a glimpse of wandering mind played for comedic effect. And then you realize that these strange ideas are all connected to the heart of what this ridiculous story is about: that a field might make an excellent retail outlet mall, that the polar bear’s black nose is the only thing giving the predator away, that the monarch butterfly tricks its predators with color into believing it’s poison, that Japanese businessmen buy used panties in vending machines. The world is linked, in nature and perversion, by the logic of the market. At least, that is, according to the global business aphorisms. The ideas of Mark Whitacre are those of the guy next door whose read too much of the Friedmans—Milton the scholar and Thomas the pitchman. Here is an imagination absolutely fixated. Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or shout. Though I think Soderbergh is most definitely shouting.

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