In his 1993 sonnet “Informer”, Canadian literary icon Darrin O’Brien (better known as ‘Snow’) intones:

Me sittin’ round cool with my dibbie dibbie girl/
Police knock my door/
Lick up my pal/
Rough me up and I can’t do a thing/
Pick up my line, when my telephone ring.

He paints a grim picture: a man terrorized by the law, agitated and paranoid, with the police wire-tapping his phone and banging down his door. As if he’s letting them in -- they licked up his pal, dammit!

Steven Soderbergh (Snowderbergh?) explores similar themes in his latest film The Informant!, albeit in a more jovial tone. Matt Damon portrays the title character, one who gets intimately familiar with wire taps, recording devices and hidden cameras as he tumbles down the rabbit hole of an F.B.I. investigation. Having agreed to assist in the bureau’s inquiry into an international price-fixing scheme, Damon’s Mark Whitacre revels in the attention of being an official “cooperating witness” and is convinced he can keep his job and his friends through the process. Getting in bed with the feds proves ill-advised, however, as Whitacre’s got a few dirty secrets of his own. What he soon learns about the law, as O’Brien’s “Informer” told us some 16 years ago, is that once you let it in the door, you’re screwed. To paraphrase: the law is like a vampire.

Watching Matt Damon get screwed by a vampire, mind you, is far more enjoyable than you'd expect. Soderbergh reminds us this is a comic tale foremost by painstakingly recreating the corporate cheese of the early 90s workplace. Heinous neck-ties, terrible rugs and poorly cut suits are de rigueur, and Damon’s Whitacre looks right in his element. Whitacre bumbles through the proceedings with the perfect patsy naïveté, and Damon does a delicate job of allowing his character a rather disturbing transformation while remaining lovable all the while. His character also shares a series of hilarious inner-dialogue ramblings along the way, in which he expounds on the psychology of poison-winged butterflies, the hunting practices of polar bears and more. These work to galvanize Whitacre as the insecure, scatterbrained heart of the film while hinting at his disconnection from the world around him.

And what does it all mean, you’re asking? What does The Informant! teach us about playing games with the law that we didn’t learn from “Informer” so many moons ago? Not much, really. But Damon is outstanding, the film looks fantastic, and the laughs and plot twists keep coming. Like “Informer” before it, The Informant! is an expertly crafted story, a perfect snapshot of the cheesiness of the early 90s, and a chance to see a white boy at the top of his game.