The highest ranking executive ever to turn state’s evidence in a case of corporate fraud, Mark Whitacre once served as a biotech division president for Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the largest food and ingredients companies in the world. Based on this true story, Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! opens with Whitacre (played by an overweight, typically boyish Matt Damon) pleasantly ensconced in a plush corporate lifestyle. He lives for his job as a biochemist turned executive, breathlessly describing the revolutions in corn technology to his politely disinterested wife and children whenever he finds the time to get out of the office. As Whitacre drives this captive audience through rural Illinois in one of his myriad high-priced cars, Soderbergh’s camera flips upside down to follow Whitacre and his corn-based ramblings. This shot turns out to be a telling symbol for the film as a whole: Mark Whitacre’s life is about to be turned on its head.
The first half of Whitacre’s story plays out like the typical tale of a corporate whistleblower. Encouraged by his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) to “do the right thing,” Whitacre reveals to FBI agents that his company is engaged at the highest level in international price fixing deals. Convinced to wear a wire, he then gathers hundreds of tapes of evidence that build the government’s case against ADM and bring indictments against many of his friends and coworkers. We get a few laughs at Whitacre’s expense, mostly due to the straight faced acting of Damon who maintains an earnest seriousness throughout his character’s semi-comic missteps and mistakes.
But if this were the whole film, Soderbergh would simply be rehashing territory he covered to wide acclaim in Erin Brockovich – Everyman David brings down corporate Goliath. Instead, the director slowly reveals that Whitacre is not the white knight he makes himself out to be. Whitacre lies to the FBI initially about a few small matters and his first betrayals of their trust we write off as mistakes of a man who has never dealt with the pressures of working undercover. However, these lies soon spiral out of control and we begin to realize that the lines between good and corrupt in his world are blurry at best. The audience learns of each deception with the same disbelief as the characters onscreen. Blindside after blindside hits us until we eventually realize that Whitacre has embezzled millions of dollars from his company at the same time as his work with the FBI to bring down the fraudulent price fixers.
Once the lies begin, Soderbergh keeps them coming as the movie’s fast pacing mirrors the snowballing of Whitacre’s life. The dark comedy is rampant here as Damon’s Whitacre assures the audience and the other characters that each lie is his last, that he’s finally come out with the full truth, only to reveal another more fantastic fabrication. Each time the embezzlement comes up, the amount stolen has grown. The audience can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all as what we first believe was a couple hundred thousand dollars balloons into over nine million in embezzled funds. We can laugh when Whitacre accuses his former friend and FBI handler of assaulting him with a briefcase, but the stark reality of a man grasping at the last straws of livelihood is never far from the surface.
Therein lies the appeal of this film, the double-edged sword of a man who does both the right and wrong thing. Subversive in his humor, Soderbergh breaks down the audience’s trust in Whitacre as a narrator. Like the lies, Whitacre’s interior monologues are humorous at first, but end up deeply sad, overlapping his spoken words as we see the man’s final breaking point. The movie, like its protagonist, is devilishly ambivalent. Is it humorous or tragic? Was Whitacre given a raw deal or did he get what he deserved? In the end, is he a good guy or a bad guy? Soderbergh never gives us the answer to these questions, instead leaving it up to the audience to decide for ourselves. Ultimately, the message seems to be that life is not as clear cut as the endings and answers we are accustomed to finding in the movies. This mentally challenging, psychologically dense tragicomedy signals the end of the summer blockbusters and ushers in the beginning of Oscar season. Hollywood kicks things off on the right foot with this gem from Soderbergh.
Three and a Half Stars / Four
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
Sleepless in Seattle
Watching Sleepless in Seattle, it feels as if director Nora Ephron has read David Bordwell’s essay “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures” and intentionally modeled her movie after the conventions he lays out. Sleepless matches up almost perfectly to Bordwell’s definition of a classical Hollywood film.
Bordwell’s first claim is that “the classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals.” Very early in the film, the psychological motivations of both Sam (Tom Hanks) and Annie (Meg Ryan) are made clear and the goals or problems they deal with follow from those motivations. Sam loves his son Jonah and misses his deceased wife; his problem or goal is to find a new woman to love and fill the void in his life. Annie wants to find a man who can satisfy her idealized vision of love, a vision that is shaped by her mother’s memories and Cary Grant films.
He then posits “a double causal [narrative] structure, two plot lines.” The first plot line involves heterosexual romance. In Sleepless this is obviously the long distance love interest between Sam and Annie. Will they ever meet? Are they actually meant to be together as the film would have us believe? The other plot line involves “another sphere” of the characters’ lives; in this case it seems to be “other personal relationships.” The film spends a lot of time developing Sam’s relationship with Jonah and Annie’s relationship with her fiancé. Sam wants to make his son happy by finding another woman to be with and Annie must determine if her fiancé is actually the man she is meant to be with. Of course these plot lines tie in very closely to the heterosexual love interest but they are ultimately distinct. Annie’s struggle fits this especially well. The climax of this narrative is when she returns her engagement ring to her fiancé and leaves to find Sam on the Empire State Building.
Also typical of classic Hollywood is the happy ending. Although we never know for sure what happens once Sam and Annie finally meet in person (we never even see them hold a conversation), clues in the film indicate that they will live ‘happily ever after.’ Both characters have conversations about the magic of love when hands touch for the first time. Ephron’s camera focuses in on Sam and Annie’s hands as when they first meet and the implication is that they have experienced that magic. I imagine that if the electricity hadn’t been present the two would have dropped hands immediately, realizing that it simply wasn’t meant to be. The looks on their faces and the continued physical contact of hand holding indicate that Sam and Annie have in fact met their respective soul mates.
Beyond conventions of plot or syuzhet, Bordwell lays out some specific narrative hallmarks of classic Hollywood films. He says that “classical narration tends to be omniscient, highly communicative, and only moderately self-conscious.” The narrator in Sleepless in Seattle is the camera; there are no voiceovers or omniscient characters. The camera itself is omniscient though because it reveals to the viewer the thoughts and actions of both protagonists even though they are separated by the distance of the American continent. We see Sam’s half-dreaming conversation with his deceased wife. We see Annie pour out her doubts to her friend only to present a very different face in public and with her fiancé. Incidences like these contribute to the viewer having a perspective on events that is above and beyond any character; we know the actions and thoughts that are happening at all times, even when they are known to only one person within the movie. This narrative omniscience goes along with the communicative aspect of classical narration – Ephron never leaves any gaps in our knowledge. Events move forward in a basic cause and effect manner; if any information is cut out, the dialogue fills us in on what we missed. This device is never obvious though; the narration is mostly covert. The one device that does indicate moderate self-consciousness is the technique of showing the map of the United States and the path of a plane to indicate that characters are traversing time and distance. Like the rest of the film techniques in Sleepless though, this is simply a vehicle for the transmission of the story; the film is plot driven rather than overtly concerned with style.
So Sleepless in Seattle fits neatly into Bordwell’s conventions of a classic Hollywood movie. To me, this is actually the film’s biggest weakness – it is too conventional. Ephron never takes us out of our comfort zone as we watch her movie. Once events get set in motion, we can easily predict what will happen next. Sam and Annie, despite a few bumps in the road, will eventually get together and have a joint happy ending. In order to make a more memorable or enjoyable film, Ephron should have bucked the conventions in at least a few minor ways. By following the classical formula so closely, she left very little doubt or tension as to what would ultimately happen. In an effort to make her film different from other classical movies that followed the same basic outline, the director ended up with a premise that seems too far fetched to be believable. Why would two people who have never met and live on opposite ends of the country fall in love? To the viewer, the answer to this question is irrelevant because we know that, as a film made in the classical Hollywood style, the movie will conclude with Sam and Annie falling in love. Efforts to answer the “why” largely fall flat as Ephron relies on our preconceived expectations of a happy ending to justify the unbelievability of her film.
Bordwell’s first claim is that “the classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals.” Very early in the film, the psychological motivations of both Sam (Tom Hanks) and Annie (Meg Ryan) are made clear and the goals or problems they deal with follow from those motivations. Sam loves his son Jonah and misses his deceased wife; his problem or goal is to find a new woman to love and fill the void in his life. Annie wants to find a man who can satisfy her idealized vision of love, a vision that is shaped by her mother’s memories and Cary Grant films.
He then posits “a double causal [narrative] structure, two plot lines.” The first plot line involves heterosexual romance. In Sleepless this is obviously the long distance love interest between Sam and Annie. Will they ever meet? Are they actually meant to be together as the film would have us believe? The other plot line involves “another sphere” of the characters’ lives; in this case it seems to be “other personal relationships.” The film spends a lot of time developing Sam’s relationship with Jonah and Annie’s relationship with her fiancé. Sam wants to make his son happy by finding another woman to be with and Annie must determine if her fiancé is actually the man she is meant to be with. Of course these plot lines tie in very closely to the heterosexual love interest but they are ultimately distinct. Annie’s struggle fits this especially well. The climax of this narrative is when she returns her engagement ring to her fiancé and leaves to find Sam on the Empire State Building.
Also typical of classic Hollywood is the happy ending. Although we never know for sure what happens once Sam and Annie finally meet in person (we never even see them hold a conversation), clues in the film indicate that they will live ‘happily ever after.’ Both characters have conversations about the magic of love when hands touch for the first time. Ephron’s camera focuses in on Sam and Annie’s hands as when they first meet and the implication is that they have experienced that magic. I imagine that if the electricity hadn’t been present the two would have dropped hands immediately, realizing that it simply wasn’t meant to be. The looks on their faces and the continued physical contact of hand holding indicate that Sam and Annie have in fact met their respective soul mates.
Beyond conventions of plot or syuzhet, Bordwell lays out some specific narrative hallmarks of classic Hollywood films. He says that “classical narration tends to be omniscient, highly communicative, and only moderately self-conscious.” The narrator in Sleepless in Seattle is the camera; there are no voiceovers or omniscient characters. The camera itself is omniscient though because it reveals to the viewer the thoughts and actions of both protagonists even though they are separated by the distance of the American continent. We see Sam’s half-dreaming conversation with his deceased wife. We see Annie pour out her doubts to her friend only to present a very different face in public and with her fiancé. Incidences like these contribute to the viewer having a perspective on events that is above and beyond any character; we know the actions and thoughts that are happening at all times, even when they are known to only one person within the movie. This narrative omniscience goes along with the communicative aspect of classical narration – Ephron never leaves any gaps in our knowledge. Events move forward in a basic cause and effect manner; if any information is cut out, the dialogue fills us in on what we missed. This device is never obvious though; the narration is mostly covert. The one device that does indicate moderate self-consciousness is the technique of showing the map of the United States and the path of a plane to indicate that characters are traversing time and distance. Like the rest of the film techniques in Sleepless though, this is simply a vehicle for the transmission of the story; the film is plot driven rather than overtly concerned with style.
So Sleepless in Seattle fits neatly into Bordwell’s conventions of a classic Hollywood movie. To me, this is actually the film’s biggest weakness – it is too conventional. Ephron never takes us out of our comfort zone as we watch her movie. Once events get set in motion, we can easily predict what will happen next. Sam and Annie, despite a few bumps in the road, will eventually get together and have a joint happy ending. In order to make a more memorable or enjoyable film, Ephron should have bucked the conventions in at least a few minor ways. By following the classical formula so closely, she left very little doubt or tension as to what would ultimately happen. In an effort to make her film different from other classical movies that followed the same basic outline, the director ended up with a premise that seems too far fetched to be believable. Why would two people who have never met and live on opposite ends of the country fall in love? To the viewer, the answer to this question is irrelevant because we know that, as a film made in the classical Hollywood style, the movie will conclude with Sam and Annie falling in love. Efforts to answer the “why” largely fall flat as Ephron relies on our preconceived expectations of a happy ending to justify the unbelievability of her film.
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