POLITICALPICTURES
THE INFORMANT! Warner Brothers, 2009
DISTRICT 9, TriStar Pictures, 2009
Review by David Sterritt
Before getting to a pair of top-notch pictures that everyone should see — The Informant! and District 9 — I want to return briefly to the fuss I recently made about Kathryn Bigelow's movie The Hurt Locker, which brilliantly depicts the moment-to-moment realities of the Iraq war without showing any interest in the politics behind the war. What bothered me was the yawning gap between the movie's excellence as cinema and its deficiency as history and commentary — a gap that takes on dismaying importance in a film about the most perfidious and disastrous geopolitical event so far this century. It wouldn't have been difficult for Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal to inject a few sequences where, say, soldiers candidly discuss the war or transmit their views to friends, relatives, or veterans groups back home. This would have added to the picture's realism, since soldiers naturally talk about such things. Without that dimension, the film is an exciting war drama but a sadly missed opportunity.
I bring this up again because some cynics take movies like The Hurt Locker as evidence that Hollywood is downright phobic about political issues. That idea would drive me out of the reviewing business if it were true, because we'd be stuck forever in the self-renewing loop of an apolitical society producing apolitical movies that influence the apolitical society that produces more apolitical movies ... and on and on. But popular films can be smart and political when they want to be, and lately they've wanted that on more than one occasion.
I'm particularly pleased with The Informant! because its director, Steven Soderbergh, disappointed me last year by falling short of the enormous potential he was presented with in Che, his two-part Che Guevara biopic. Although he doesn't always let it show, Soderbergh has canny political instincts — his 2000 pictures Traffic and Erin Brockovich are good examples — and in The Informant! he parleys them into a funny and ingenious tale that's fact-based and intelligent to boot.
The Informant! is a tricky movie to discuss, however, because if you know its plot twists in advance (there are about a thousand of them) you'll miss the fun of being taken repeatedly by surprise. So don't worry, I won't be too much of an informant. Suffice it to say that Matt Damon plays a wheeler-dealer named Mark Whitacre who's climbing cheerfully up the ladder at Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agribusiness corporation. One day he approaches his boss with the information that there's a mole in their midst sabotaging part of their operation while feeding information to one of their competitors. Asked how he learned about this, Mark names an overseas contact who wants to blackmail the firm. Mark's boss alerts the FBI and an earnest-looking agent visits Mark's home to set up security measures before the extortionist calls again.
That's as much as I can say without giving away too much, even though we're only a few minutes into the film. I will add, though, that the cast is excellent: Damon gets steadily better as the years go by; Scott Bakula gives a flawless minimalist performance as the main FBI agent; Melanie Lynskey is perfect as Mark's perfect wife; and everyone else is splendid. Cinematically, the movie is crystal-clear vernacular filmmaking — there's not one showy or pretentious shot — and Soderbergh has savvy insights into how corrupt power brokers feed off one another's failings. Iraq isn't mentioned in The Informant! and there's no special reason why it should be, but the film's ultimate villain reminds me of the Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who snookered the CIA by saying exactly what the self-serving agency wanted to hear. Soderbergh nails that dynamic harrowingly and hilariously, blowing his own whistle on capitalist greed, corporate price fixing, and the way all the stuff we eat nowadays seems to be made out of bioengineered corn. This is tragedy as farce, and a movie that's hard to forget.
Looking at the posters and publicity for District 9, I expected it to be a standard science-fiction epic, devoted more to eye-dazzling action and eardrum-piercing noise than to old-fashioned values like psychology, intelligence, and atmosphere. I've run out of patience with movies so drenched in computerized effects that you wonder if any of this stuff actually happened, even on a Hollywood soundstage, or if an army of techies conjured up the whole spectacle with digitized gizmos. But this time the joke was on me. District 9 has genuinely progressive things to say about injustice, inequality, and the spiritual escapism that allows majority populations to engage in the pursuit of happiness without addressing social evils that fester all around.
The story begins when a massive spaceship arrives over Johannesburg, South Africa, hovering in the air for months with no apparent purpose. Flying up to investigate, a human crew finds it crammed with malnourished aliens who can't get back home because their propulsion system has conked out. In typical earthling fashion, designated authorities rescue the aliens from their ship and give them living space in specially set-aside areas — which soon become ghettoes, and then degenerate into slums, and then get condemned for destruction because they're so disheartening for humans to behold. In a nicely offbeat touch, the movie's main character is the bureaucrat in charge of getting the aliens off the public radar screen. He's an unsympathetic antihero, but he's definitely worth studying, since the likes of him have been at work for decades in South Africa, the Gaza Strip, the prison cells at Guantánamo and Bagram, and more other places than there's room to mention here.
District 9 was directed and co-written by South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, who skillfully mixes sci-fi adventure with racial allegory, mounting an all-out-attack on the oppression, repression, and inhumanity imposed on defenseless minorities around the world. The picture delivers plenty of roller-coaster action for fans of the genre, but it's the message that counts, and to Blomkamp's credit, that message is impossible to miss.
David Sterritt, Tikkun's film critic, is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University. He was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for decades. His latest books are Guiltless Pleasures and The B List.
