Manic depressive disorder, better known as bipolar disorder, is no laughing matter.  Those who suffer from it, and other psychological and neurological disorders like it, live in a state of constant uncertainty punctuated by unpredictable episodes of mania or hypermania and severe depression. Some episodes can even lead to delusions and hallucinations.  Likewise, corporate price-fixing, which victimizes millions of consumers daily while perpetuating the gross inequalities of social class, is a humorless occurrence.  So naturally, when posed with the task of adapting New York Times reporter, Kurt Eichenwald’s thrilling non-fiction police procedural, “The Informant,” that chronicles uniquely troubling cases of both, director Steven Soderbergh couldn’t help but turn it into a comedy.

The more I learn about giant agribusiness conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland and Mark Whitacre, their BioProducts President turned whitleblower instrumental in embroiling the company in a federal investigation in the early 1990s, the clearer it becomes that Soderbergh, and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, made the right choice.

Whitacre, played brilliantly by Matt Damon, is an intellectual giant without the benefit of commons sense.  He was an Ivy League man who became the youngest executive in ADM’s history.  He had a beautiful wife and kids, and all the money he could ever spend.  Yet, a nagging need to lie, regardless of the ramifications to his career and family, coupled with greed and the devastating effects of manic depressive disorder proved too much for the rising star.  Whitacre’s conscience, or more appropriately, his wife’s conscience provokes his confession to the FBI about ADM’s price-fixing practices with its competitors on an amino acid central to their operations called lysine.

What Whitacre doesn’t immediately reveal to the feds, however, is his own involvement in a number of criminal activities.  While working as an operative for the FBI for three years on the price-fixing case, he was simultaneously defrauding his own company for $5 million, or was it $7 million… or $9 million?  Combine the double, triple, and quadruple crossings throughout the mind-bogglingly twisted narrative with the unbelievably absurd fact that Whitacre still held out hope that when all was said and done he’d still have a future at the company, and you’ve got a story so ridiculously laughable that any reasonable person would scoff at it’s utter implausibility, that is, if it didn’t also happen to be true.

And as if the unbelievable truthfulness of the contorted story wasn’t enough to keep us entertained, Burns rolls the dice on a mighty gamble in adding a considerable amount of voice-over, generally coming from the unreliable, yet often hilarious mind of Damon’s perplexing character.  Some of the most tense and uncomfortable moments are diffused, and in some cases heightened, by Whitacre’s oddball in-reverie recitations of obscure facts or nonsensical musings that usually have nothing at all to do with the issue at hand.  For instance, when he thinks to himself, “Polar bears cover their noses before they pounce on a seal. How do polar bears know their noses are black? Did they look in the water one day, see their reflection and say, ‘Man, I’d be invisible if it wasn’t for that thing,’” it would seem that he’s certainly not adding anything to the story’s progression.  But, it’s these hilarious scatter-brained observations that humanize Whitacre and allow us to lend a convicted felon the minuscule sympathies  necessary for the film to work.

Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” lacks the poignancy of “Traffic,” the earnestness of “Sex, Lies, & Videotape,” and the harsh realities of “Bubble,” and may even fall short of its own intrinsic goals, but always manages to entertain.

Score: 3.5/5