You forget you’re watching Matt Damon. He’s playing a spy. But with a dorky moustache, a toupée and an extra 20 lb. puffing out his features, there’s no trace of the dynamic secret agent from the Bourne franchise. In Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, an off-kilter comedy based on a true story of corporate corruption, Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an agri-biz honcho who became the highest-ranking whistle-blower in U.S. history during the late ’90s. But unlike most whistle-blowers—such as the one in The Insider or Soderbergh’s own Erin Brockovich—he is no straight-arrow hero. Far from it. While spending years wearing a wire to help the FBI expose a price-fixing conspiracy, Whitacre spins an elaborate web of lies, and embezzles millions from the company he was ratting on.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-19) and opening commercially next week, The Informant! is one of a new breed of movies about men of influence in dire straits who invent their own cracked ethical code. Each year, TIFF showcases the fall line of serious films that vie for Oscar glory, pictures that presume to tell us something about the human condition. And whether by accident or design, many of this year’s most prominent titles reflect a new fashion in heroism that seems tailor-made for the recession: moral bankruptcy.
The new Hollywood hero is a high-flying master of the universe who’s losing altitude as fast as the ground vanishes beneath his feet. He’s a liar, a fraud, a womanizer, a drug addict, a nutcase, or all of the above. He’s Michael Douglas as a disgraced car magnate with a wrecked marriage and a runaway libido in Solitary Man. He’s David Duchovny as the head of a model family that turns out to be an utter sham in The Joneses. He’s Nicolas Cage as a crack-smoking cop who hallucinates reptiles in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Or Peter Sarsgaard as a smooth con artist who seduces a 16-year-old English schoolgirl in An Education, soliciting her father as a gullible accomplice. Or Ricky Gervais as a screenwriter who discovers the marvel of dishonesty in The Invention of Lying—a comedy set in a world where everyone tells the truth.
Up in the Air, perhaps the most hotly anticipated film premiering at TIFF, stars George Clooney as an obsessive frequent flyer who earns his living firing people for downsizing corporations. And he loves his job. Loosely based on the novel by Walter Kirn, it’s written and directed by Juno’s Jason Reitman. TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey says it marks a leap in maturity that will elevate the 31-year-old Canadian into the ranks of major filmmakers. “It feels like it was directed by a 45-year-old,” says Bailey. “There’s a real moral reckoning to it, a philosophical world of substance. It’s about a whole class of people who live their lives literally at 30,000 feet and seeing what happens when the sky falls.”
Coincidentally, Damon and Clooney—former cohorts in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise—both play platinum-card frequent flyers who inhabit a pressurized cabin of personal entitlement that verges on the delusional. And both their movies reflect the zeitgeist of a corporate culture in free fall. “You walk into a buzz saw when you try to articulate the zeitgeist,” Soderbergh told me when asked to do exactly that in an interview last week. But films like his, he concedes, do resonate with a culture addicted to deceit—an America whose moral compass has gone haywire. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy about,” he says. “People are responding to the mixed signals they’re getting. You see people getting rewarded in one area, then punished in another. When no one will tell you the truth about what’s going on, what are the arguments for me being a model citizen?”
Ironically, although Up in the Air and The Informant! have landed with uncanny timing, Soderbergh and Reitman both spent six years trying to bring their respective movies to the screen while juggling other projects. Which suggests they were tapping into the early roots of a malaise long before it erupted in the recent economic collapse.
After reading Kurt Eichenwald’s investigative bestseller, The Informant (2000), Soderbergh says he decided to spin it into a comedy partly to distinguish it from other whistle-blower movies. “But also it’s got one of the best building blocks of comedy—the lie that escalates and gets out of control. The things Whitacre was doing were so insane.” And now, Soderbergh adds, “I’m really glad we made it a comedy. Because you’re seeing the straight version in the paper every day.”
Reitman, meanwhile, started writing Up in the Air even before shooting his feature debut, Thank You for Smoking. “This has been in my heart and soul for a long time,” he says on the phone from Los Angeles. “What spoke to me is the idea of living adrift, living hub-to-hub. As I wrote the script, it became more and more relevant. It’s right for the time because we’re living in the most disconnected time in human history. We falsely believe we’re connected with more people than ever before because of texting and Facebook and Twitter. But we actually don’t connect to any of these people.”
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