The Plot: (Spoilers)
In the early 1990s, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is an executive at Archer-Daniels-Midland, where he is in charge of the company’s production of a new food additive called lysine. ADM’s lysine production capacity is being limited by a mysterious virus in a lysine plant, and Whitacre is under pressure to solve the problem. One day, Whitacre reports to his boss that he received a phone call from someone at a Japanese competitor, who claimed that the virus was planted by a mole specifically to stop ADMs lysine production, and that he would provide the name of the mole and the way to stop the virus for $10 million. Whitacre’s boss tells Whitacre that if he gets another call he should try to talk the price down. ADM’s security director Mark Cheviron (Thomas F. Wilson) decides to call in the FBI to investigate the call and hopefully find the mole. As the investigation gets started, FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) comes to Whitacre’s home to tap his phone line. At the insistence of his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), Whitacre tells Shepard about a price-fixing conspiracy for lysine and other food additives involving ADM and its competitors around the world.
Whitacre starts working as an undercover informant for FBI agents Shepard and Herndon (Joel McHale), recording meetings all over the world with concealed tape recorders and hidden cameras to get the FBI enough evidence to prosecute ADM’s executives, which takes about three years. In addition to wanting to stop the price-fixing, Whitacre believes that he will become ADM’s CEO after the other executives are arrested, an end result that the FBI agents never clearly admit is unlikely (though Ginger tries).
The stress takes its toll on Whitacre, and at times he frustrates the FBI agents with his unreliability, at one point claiming that he has stopped making tapes because the ADM executives have been scared straight from fear of being caught. Despite these issues, and some other amusing examples of Whitacre’s ineptitude as a spy such as narrating his tapes, conspicuously inspecting a lamp for a hidden camera the FBI told him about and trying to fix a malfunctioning tape recorder hidden in his briefcase in the middle of a meeting, Whitacre succeeds in delivering the FBI enough evidence for a raid without giving himself away (though he almost gives the raid away by telling innocent coworkers, such as his secretary, about it, leading to one of the executives knowing about it).
The FBI maintains Whitacre’s cover by temporarily taking him into custody as well, so the other executives won’t suspect him, but they tell him it is important that he tell them right away that he plans to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation and get his own lawyer that is separate from those who work for ADM. Whitacre doesn’t say any of this until he is presented with a lawyer provided by ADM, and after a closed-door meeting between Whitacre and the company lawyer, which the audience doesn’t see or hear, the company lawyer and Whitacre tell the executives that they agree that Whitacre should have a different lawyer.
Though he is no longer supposed to be talking to them, Whitacre has lunch with Shepard & Herndon, asking them about “hypothetical” situations leading up to kickbacks and embezzlement, which he says were “standard practice” among the executives at ADM, and that his boss showed him how. When asks how much money is involved, Whitacre basically admits to taking $500,000. They tell him he needs to admit everything to his lawyers.
Whitacre doesn’t tell his lawyers about everything though, only certain things, and ADM’s own investigation finds more and more instances of Whitacre’s embezzlement, laundered through forged invoices from fictional overseas companies, which Whitacre was engaged in while he was working with the FBI. (Some of this was seen earlier in the film, though it wasn’t entirely clear at the time what was happening.) Whitacre doesn’t admit to any specific instances until he is presented with evidence, to the annoyance of his lawyers, who try to make the case that Whitacre cracked under the stress the FBI created by making him an undercover agent with no training, but the mounting evidence against Whitacre, who ultimately admits to having embezzled a total of $9 million, from before and after he started working with the FBI, doesn’t help their case. Whitacre also can’t stay out of the media spotlight, despite being told not to talk to the media. He starts making wild claims to defend himself, including that the FBI told him to destroy tapes that didn’t support their case and that Shepard hit him with a briefcase. It is eventually found that Whitacre is bipolar and a chronic liar. His original story about a mole sabotaging ADM’s lysine facility, the original reason the FBI got involved, was just a story he made up because of the pressure he was under to solve the problem; he never actually got a phone call and soon after the natural cause of the virus was found and the problem was solved. Even a story he told several times in the film about his parents dying when he was young, leading to him being adopted by a rich man who owned an amusement park is found to be a lie: nothing ever happened to his middle-class parents, who are still alive, and he made up the story for his application essays to Ivy League colleges and had to stick to his story when he was accepted. Eventually he and his lawyers frustrate each other to the point that they part ways, and Whitacre ends up with a much less competent lawyer and is sent to prison for the embezzlement with a much longer sentence than the ADM executives who were guilty of price-fixing.
In the final scene, an older, incarcerated Whitacre is seen making a video plea for a presidential pardon, with the help of Herndon, who felt that Whitacre deserved a lesser sentence for helping the FBI. The film closes by stating that Whitacre never received a pardon, but served his sentence and became the Chief Operating Officer of Cypress Systems in California.
My Review:
This is such a strange story that it would be unbelievable if it weren’t actually true. Little of what Whitacre does makes sense, but that is the point. The story is compelling and definitely takes some unexpected turns. Matt Damon gives a good performance as an unusual character, and the supporting cast does fine, though none of them stand out. The film is directed by Steven Soderbergh, perhaps best known for Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, which also feature Damon. In an odd choice, the titles and even some of the music seem to be more appropriate for a film set the late 60’s than in the early 90’s. The use of voiceovers by Damon to show Whitacre’s inner thoughts, which often have little in anything to do with the story, works well though, and is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the film. This is a difficult movie to describe, but I enjoyed it. I would criticize the trailers, which depicted it a more of a comedy, and while there are definitely comedic elements to it, it didn’t really seem meant to be a comedy, but more of a cautionary example of how lying can quickly get out of hand and lead to serious consequences.
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