Steven Soderbergh has had a fascinatingly schizophrenic career. It began with the visionary Indie hit “sex, lies, and videotape”; by now, it has expanded to include star-driven capers like “Ocean’s 11-13” without excluding commercially hopeless ventures like a Tarkovsky remake (“Solaris”) and a 4 hour film about Che Guevara (“Che”).

Of the two films Soderbergh has released this year, “The Informant!” is definitely the “mainstream one”; it stars Matt Damon, and it’s a slickly-produced straight-ahead comedy (or at least makes a good show of being one). Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an executive at a food additives company who decides to let the FBI in on the rampant price-fixing going on there. His decision and cooperation are instrumental in exposing the company’s corruption. However, there’s something wrong with Mark.  It is hard to tell, at first, whether he is adorable or grotesque. Damon presents a beautifully realized caricature of flabby middle-aged self-obsession, with a fluffy moustache, anti-movie-star paunch, wide-eyed naiveté, and a running interior monologue of inanities and rationalizations.  

While “The Informant!” is slick and smooth, it strongly recalls Soderbergh’s roughest-hewn indie detour, “Schizopolis” (1996).  “Schizopolis” was intentionally self-absorbed and absurd, with Soderbergh playing his own lead (and his ex-wife playing his wife), and featuring a wildly disorganized doodle of a plot. And while “The Informant!” has a straightforward narrative and is based closely on a true story, both of the protagonists are unfulfilled office drudges with rather strained marriages and jobs at corrupt companies where rumors of a “mole” from a rival company are circulating and where “the Japanese” are held in suspicion.

Soderbergh has probably matured lots as a storyteller since “Schizopolis,” in which every idea seemed like a reinforcement of Soderbergh’s personal insecurities and fixations, with conceptually heavy-handed experiments with language (e.g. characters say random words instead of real sentences in some scenes) and juvenile gestures of self-exposure (e.g. scenes of comic masturbation). It’s an interesting look at a creative and troubled mind at play, but the mind-games never overcome a feeling of clammy desperation. “The Informant!”, on the other hand, uses many of the same tactics in a work of observation and even analysis. We are inside Mark Whitacre’s fuzzy head in many respects, from the babbling narration to a score (by the ever-inventive Marvin Hamlisch) that imitates the spy thrillers and corporate dramas in which Mark imagines himself participating. As in “Schizopolis,” there is a feeling of anti-logic, with the nonsense in this case emerging from the mechanics of Mark’s self-centered outlook. As we penetrate the surface, though, these devices serve to alienate us from Mark. As we learn that Mark is hiding just as much about himself as he is revealing about his company, we stop trusting him; we even stop laughing at him, for all his childlike earnestness and silly mannerisms. A monster is not cute. The film’s manic style begins as a kind of farce and ends as something cold and creepy. For a director as slick and intellectual as Soderbergh, this may be as close as it gets to outrage.

Although “The Informant!” never approaches the explicit meta-commentary of “Schizopolis,” it does present itself, subtly, as another work of self-criticism. The biggest clue is the opening credits sequence, where we watch the tapes and film gathered by Mark being played. There are no human beings in the sequence, just loving close-ups of reels of film and cassettes chugging along, accompanied by old-fashioned romantic music. We are being prepared for a world where the mechanical is the only thing worth loving and exploring; the human being, upon close inspection, proves corrupt and destructive, and observing him is an ultimately joyless task. This movie would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.

(three and a half MASSIVE PUMPKINS)