This tightly knit film shows us a Matt Damon who’s about as far away from Bourne as you could imagine -- he has a moustache and lots of hair, he’s 30 pounds heavier, and he’s as crazy as a loon. Damon plays the real-life Mark Whitacre, the vice president of Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s who procured evidence to indict his company on charges of global price fixing.

The movie could have simply been an exciting cat-and-mouse thriller about whistle blowing, but director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (who based his script on the Kurt Eichenwald book), have chosen to bring Whitacre’s craziness to the fore and create a most appealing comedy. Whitacre narrates the movie, but often with facts that are totally irrelevant to what’s happening onscreen. Yet within his manufactured logic, he’s totally honest to himself. He believes he’s doing the right thing by sinking his company and turning evidence over to the FBI. Fashioning himself as some sort of James Bond, he flaunts his wiretapping, so much so that it shocks and embarrasses the FBI agents watching and listening at the other end.

Whitacre is so sure of himself that he starts piling on crimes of his own, convinced that they aren’t nearly as bad as the crimes he’s helping to unmask. His unraveling seems to be as much of a surprise to him as it is to the audience. Damon simply nails every facet of this character in a performance that’s sure to be nominated for an Oscar. The rest of the cast is excellent too. Scott Bakula plays a believable Brian Shepard, the FBI agent working on the case as Whitacre’s handler, and Melanie Lynskey is perfectly naïve as Whitacre’s loving, dupable wife, Ginger. The remaining players are well cast character actors who seem familiar but unfamiliar at the same time.

Marvin Hamlisch has created a music score with a perky theme reminiscent of ’70s TV, sort of like "Put on a Happy Face," and it conveys Soderbergh’s vision of a man who is playing against himself, or possibly playing everyone else. The digital picture is clean, and though it has the look of something we might first encounter on television, this quality adds to its credibility. All of the elements combine to convince the audience that Whitacre is a visionary rather than a nut.

This is a movie that needs second and third viewings to be fully sorted out. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the Blu-ray, which will probably arrive soon after the Academy’s nomination of Matt Damon as Best Actor.

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