The Informant! (2009)

Matt Damon turns in a canny comic performance as Mark Whitacre, a scientist working in the office of a giant corporation. His job is to make food more profitable, such as using high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar; it's the mid-1990s and they're working on a way to feed corn to chickens without killing them. When things aren't going so well, Mark blames the problem on a mole, and the FBI is called in. After meeting the nice-looking Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula), Mark decides to go informant, turning in all his bosses for price fixing. Mark digs himself deeper and deeper, and every few minutes, it turns out that something he's been saying a few minutes earlier was yet another lie.

It all gets very complex, but the film's driving force is Mark himself and his layers of self-delusion. Mark very often narrates to himself, and his words very often have little to do with what's going on at the moment (while being grilled by the FBI, he thinks about neckties). He sometimes seems utterly clueless, and other times he's remarkably clever, and this duality keeps us watching. (Actually, he's not unlike the displaced heroine of this year's other Soderergh film, The Girlfriend Experience.)

He continually re-asserts himself as a simple, straightforward guy who's trying to do the right thing, but his lies and his goals grow ever muddier. It's more a downward spiral into one man's intellectual mousetrap, but director Soderbergh thankfully, refreshingly, plays it for laughs rather than for hand-wringing. He and composer Marvin Hamlisch routinely play cheerfully rinky-dink music on the soundtrack, which has the effect of making an otherwise dramatic FBI raid look ridiculous. It's like a funnier version of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002); but more cynical, and with less heart or depth. It's like a razor, sharp yet thin.