The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Matt Damon and Tony Hale in The Informant!

Mark Whitacre: Matt Damon
Ginger Whitacre: Melanie Lynskey
FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard: Scott Bakula
FBI Special Agent Robert Herndon: Joel McHale
Mark Cheviron: Thomas F. Wilson
Mick Andreas: Tom Papa
Terry Wilson: Rick Overton
James Epstein: Tony Hale

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Z. Burns
Based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald
Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh
Production design: Doug J. Meerdink
Film editing: Stephen Mirrione
Çomposer: Marvin Hamlisch

Both Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) and The Informant! are based on true stories about people who exposed corporate malfeasance. But while the former movie was a solid piece of entertainment showcasing a star turn for Julia Roberts, it was also one that could have been made by any good director. The Informant! is the work of an auteur, a director with a distinct, even idiosyncratic style and a clear point of view, a measure of how Steven Soderbergh has grown in technique and confidence. You can sense that from the gratuitous exclamation point appended to the title and the clunky font, redolent of rock posters from the psychedelic era, that has been imposed on the screen credits. Soderbergh is out to play with our expectations of what a film about a whistleblower cooperating with the FBI should be like. The cast is full of comedians and actors who usually play comedy, such as Joel McHale, Tony Hale, Scott Adsit, Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, and both Smothers Brothers -- Tom is a senior executive at Archer Daniels Midland and Dick is a judge -- all of them playing it straight. Their presence creates a kind of tension in the film: We keep expecting them to break out into familiar comic shtick -- for Tony Hale, for example, as Mark Whitacre's continually surprised lawyer to turn into the busybody political factotum he plays on Veep -- but they don't. Soderbergh's ironic tone is designed to fit the facts: Mark Whitacre may have been out to expose the crookedness rife at ADM by cooperating with the FBI, but he was a crook himself. We begin to sense that Whitacre may be a little bit off when we start hearing his thoughts in voiceover, meditations on polar bears and butterflies and anything else that crosses his mind, a delicious stream of consciousness that doesn't begin to hint at the complications of the character. Matt Damon gives one of his best performances as the chubby, cheerful, and morally unhinged Whitacre, and Scott Z. Burns, who had previously written a very different character for Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007), gives him wonderful things to say and do. Under his pseudonym, Peter Andrews, Soderbergh is his own cinematographer for The Informant! and he chooses slightly faded colors and casts a soft haze over many scenes, creating a subtly dated atmosphere for a film set in the early '90s, the era before ubiquitous cell phones and laptops. This is a sleeper of a film that almost went under my radar.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

So, on a repeat viewing, does Birdman hold up as the triumph of style, technique, and performance that won it a best picture Oscar, or is it seriously undermined by pretentiousness and banality? That it is undermined I can't deny, just as I can't deny that the style of Kevin Thompson's production design and Antonio Sanchez's drum score are fresh and powerful, that the technical wizardry of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and the film editing of Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione provide a seamless flow that appears to be one long tracking shot through most of the film, and that Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone give career-landmark performances. But I also have to say that I don't think the movie adds up to enough. As Richard Brody observed in his New Yorker review, Iñárritu even courts comparison to Jean-Luc Godard in the opening titles of his film -- a disastrous comparison to my mind, because whatever his faults, Godard was always going against the grain of conservative politics and social attitudes. Iñárritu is attempting a satire on the power of popular culture and celebrity to foul up even the best-intentioned attempts at doing something different. The problem is that his protagonist, Riggan Thomson (Keaton), is doing little more than trying to change his public image. He's known as a pop-culture hero from his hit Birdman movies, but like every clown who wants to play Hamlet, he's trying to make a Broadway debut in a deadly serious play he has crafted from a Raymond Carver short story. Naturally, he is plagued with insecurity, and nothing that his family, his crew, his fellow actors, or the busily buzzing entertainment media can break him free of it. There is a good human story here, but Iñárritu and his fellow screenwriters, Nicolás Giacabone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo, can't be content to just tell it. Instead, it has to be tarted up with touches of magic realism (the first time we see Riggan he is in his underpants, levitating in his dressing room), and by the unstated fact that Iñárritu has cast as the former Birdman a former Batman. We are in the realm of that tiresome trope, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the screenwriters can't help hammering on the point. Riggan has a sign on his dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said about that thing." And Mike insists that he has to drink real gin during the rehearsals because Raymond Carver was a drunk and everything else on the set is fake. He even tells Riggan's daughter (Stone) that the only time he is real is when he's onstage. The satire tends toward banality when the film takes as its target the omnipotent critic for the New York Times, who is determined, even before she sees the play, to destroy it because she resents a movie star like Riggan invading the sacred temple of the theater. So does the technical finesse of the film make up for these flaws? Only if you're willing to shut off some key parts of your intellect, which is something Godard would never ask you to do.

Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)

Traffic hasn't held up as well as it might have over the past 15 years, and one reason for that is a bit ironic: The movie was based on a British miniseries, and since the film's debut its central theme, the paralysis of politicians and police in trying to stop the drug trade, and its multiple-track storytelling have been handled more brilliantly by an American miniseries, The Wire (2002-08). It's even possible that the film demonstrates the limits faced by movies as opposed to long-form television in handling stories of complexity and sweep. (Imagine, for example, Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Breaking Bad stuffed into the confines of a two-or-three-hour movie.) Traffic still holds your interest, of course, thanks to some brilliant performances, especially the Oscar-winning one by Benicio Del Toro, as well as the ones by Don Cheadle and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (It's also fun to spot Viola Davis making a solid impression in a tiny part as a social worker.) And Soderbergh's direction deservedly won the Oscar, along with Steven Gaghan's screenplay and Stephen Mirrione's film editing. I would, however, fault Gaghan for the sentimental and melodramatic resolution to the story centering on Michael Douglas as Robert Wakefield, the newly appointed czar of the War on Drugs: It stretches credulity to have Wakefield break down in the middle of his acceptance speech and abandon his post, and the scene in which Wakefield and his wife (Amy Irving) beamingly support their drug-addicted daughter (Erika Christensen) at a twelve-step-program meeting is pure schmaltz. The film also pulls its punches a bit where the wasteful War on Drugs crusade is concerned, even to the point of featuring cameos by real-life politicians William Weld (a Reagan-administration appointee who supervised the Drug Enforcement Administration) and Senators Barbara Boxer, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, and a surprisingly young-looking Harry Reid as themselves.