Spectacular true story somehow turns out ho-hum

Mark Whitacre, the corporate whistle-blower and larcenous compulsive liar, is Matt Damon's most tirelessly nerdy role. This "true" character, an executive at Arthur Daniels Midland who turns informant about corporate price-fixing, could spoil future Bourne movies for you if you dwelt on him too much. Whitacre is heavy, with a fake bulbous nose and what looks like a hairpiece. The disguise is a failure, though, because the suits and ties are of good quality and it's still obviously Matt Damon in them. But just not the Matt Damon you want to remember.

There's an attempt to disguise the whole film as something nerdy too; the images have been given an uncomfortable overheated orange cast and supplied with vaguely Seventies inter-titles, though the action takes place in the Nineties.

Whitacre himself is mass of contradictions, though they add up to confusion, not excitement. His unrelated motor-mouth voice-overs of random facts about ties, polar bears' noses, or butterfly camouflage underline his detachment from reality and from self but do not really amuse. He's a Midwesterner, but a world traveler. He's a bold grifter who embezzles who knows how many millions, but he's boring. He leads a dull life despite living with his wife and kids in a mansion and owning a fleet of fancy German cars. He's bright, but everything he does is dumb beyond all reckoning. His wife tells him just to tell the truth and so do his FBI contacts and his lawyers, but he lies compulsively until he's sent to a posh country club jail in South Carolina on 45 counts, for ten years (released after eight and a half). Set free a few years ago, the end notes tell us, he's now a CEO. In American business (wink nudge wink nudge), virtue is always rewarded.

It's hard not to remember DiCaprio in Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, and how much more fun and how dashing that true story of a compulsive grifter was. But that was the Fifties, when flight attendants were called stewardesses and wore natty outfits; the Nineties were a drab time, and corporate graft may net you millions, but the lifestyle somehow sucks.

But still, this is an astonishing story. Why isn't the movie any fun? (It's tongue-in-cheek, but without panache.) Perhaps because it's a very complicated story, and though Scott Z. Burns has radically pared down NY Times writer Kurt Eichenwald’s 600-page book, there are still too many confusing details.

First it seems ADM's production of the enzyme lysine is jinxed by a virus, and Whitacre invents a story that a Japanese mole in the company is sabotaging the lysine cultures. Oh, by the way, ADM is a company that makes all the junk American food manufacturers put into what we eat, all the chemicals and preservatives and corn products and sweeteners, and lysine is something that's been found to make chickens able to stomach corn feed. Whitacre began as a Cornell-trained biochemist who's somehow become a vice president.

Then, Whitacre tells the FBI ADM is involved in international price fixing, and eventually they make him wear a wire and plant cameras to prove it. But it turns out that Whitacre has been embezzling the company out of millions of dollars during the several years while all this goes on. And in his lying, he sabotages himself over and over, telling the "truth" (contaminated by lies) to people he ought not to tell anything to, like the company lawyers, and the press.

Eventually he's found to be a manic depressive, AKA bi-polar; but that doesn't legally speaking excuse you from committing felonies. Ultimately the FBI has tried to get a presidential pardon for Whitacre, because they and the Justice Department, however burned they felt at the time, have concluded that Whitacre's exposure of corporate corruption was far more important than his stealing.

There's reason for anger here, and Soderbergh may feel it. However, this is too complicated to make a good story, and delivering it on film as a farce and adding an exclamation point to the original book title don't really help. Matt Damon's energy seems wasted: he still emerges as a blank. If this crackpot whistle-blower is some kind of anti-corporate hero (despite now being a CEO), why depict him throughout as a buffoon? Was that really a wise strategy? It all leaves you with a muddled feeling, and you squeeze your eyes shut and try to remember Jason Bourne racing around exotic places alongside Franka Potente, with Brian Cox and Joan Allen trying to kill them.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.