Review // THE INFORMANT - Bad movie or just a bad mood?

Since starting this blog, I now find myself watching movies with a little notebook and pen sitting on the couch beside me. I obsessively scribble down notes, thoughts and even questions I want to know the answers to. The whole reason for pursuing this blog (that something like 4 people occasionally read) was not obviously to reach an audience or change anyones opinions, but to record my thoughts on film and to facilitate a (hopefully) deeper viewing experience. This blog is more like a journal and a personal mission to try to watch and think about movies in a deeper way, instead of just using them as medication against the boredom of routine.

Sometimes I write pages and pages of notes during the course of a movie. Other times I only jot down several thoughts that form the basis of a little conversation I have with myself on these screens. But by the time Steven Soderbergh's latest The Informant had finished, the notebook page I had reserved for it was completely empty. I had no questions. I had no burning thoughts that I didn't want to forget. The movie just played in front of my eyes for two hours and never penetrated any deeper. I don't know why that is. I don't think its a bad movie. In fact, it might even be a good one. The whole experience of watching it was just... off.

I guess what I'm trying to acknowledge is that movies and art in general are certainly not static things, or more precisely, our perception of them isn't. Your opinion on a piece of art or storytelling is more a comment on that time and place, a summation of your own mood and state of mind. Movies obviously mean different things to different people, but can also mean different things at different times to the same person. I think people more readily accept this idea when it comes to music as opposed to film and narrative storytelling. Many people will say that they didn't "get" jazz or blues until they got older. But when it comes to movies, people tend to talk about them in definitive terms.

With this in mind, my view of The Informant is based on a weird, hazy funk of a viewing. The movie never took hold with me. Even as I write this, I've incorrectly written the title several times and had to correct. I called it The Insider (a Michael Mann film) and The Inside Man (a Spike Lee film). I kept feeling like I was watching a foreign movie badly dubbed or a heavily edited version where key scenes or bits of dialogue had been excised leaving me to play catch-up in a story that was clearly not intended to obfuscate. I mean it's obviously about the deception of it's main character, but it's not a puzzle of a movie meant to deceive audiences. Audiences are meant to cringe as they watch an odd little man with severe personality defects lie and steal his way into a battle with a many-headed governmental beast. For whatever reason, I never became invested enough to cringe. I kept thinking of the movie's poster and the way it defaces it's heartthrob movie star's image with ironic schlubbiness. Since nothing else was sinking in for me, I wondered if the movie existed to give Matt Damon a bad mustache and if that stunt alone is enough to get a movie made these days. I feel crappy about that, I really do. I feel like I failed you, The Informant.