Frequently in our time the whistleblower serves as a kind of Cassandra, telling a truth that nobody believes, a voice that nobody wants to hear. When the truth finally emerges and the prophet is vindicated, he or she sometimes - too seldom, actually - receives at least the reward of gratitude. Steven Soderbergh's latest movie, "The Informant," based on a true story, plays some unusual variations on both the character and the message of a prominent whistleblower who alerted authorities to the wrongdoing of a huge international company.

Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, vice president of a division of the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, who narrates portions of his own story. He opens the movie discussing the importance of a particular chemical to the company's production of fructose, reporting to his bosses that a Japanese competitor knows of their problems with the chemical, suggesting a case of international industrial espionage. The company calls in the FBI, who interview Whitacre and set up a tap on his telephone, initiating a long and complicated relationship between the executive and a particular agent, Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula).

Whitacre tells Shepard that he knows a much more important story than the alleged espionage, an enormous, long-running price fixing scheme involving some of the world's biggest agricultural companies. He agrees to wear a wire to the many meetings he attends all over the world, recording conversations between the top executives of his corporation and several others. Excited about his secret agency and happy to be serving the forces of justice, Whitacre wears the wire for more than two years, bouncing all over the globe for his company and the FBI, recording many hours of conversation for the government.

At some point in his adventures, however, the whole plan starts to unravel. He catches a case of cold feet, reluctant to take further steps against his bosses and somewhat hesitant to cooperate fully with the feds. As it turns out, the whistleblower himself has some legal problems that jeopardize the government's case against ADM; ultimately and ironically, an investigation that began as a crusade against corporate corruption devolves into charges of bribery, embezzlement, fraud, forgery, and tax evasion against the whistleblower.

Matt Damon's intermittent voiceover fools the audience as much as Mark Whitacre's behavior deceives the FBI. Throughout the movie, he utters random thoughts, some of them amusing, few of them related to the action of the movie, and many of them blatant untruths. He casually mentions that he speaks several languages, for example, yet puzzles over the proper pronunciation of Porsche (one of his eight cars) and doesn't know how to form the plural article in German.

As the film and Whitacre gradually reveal, the whistleblower demonstrates a number of contradictory psychological problems, which mostly result in his increasing disregard for the truth. An inveterate fantasist, he lies about almost everything, including his own parentage and upbringing, constantly changing his stories to suit his situation or the needs of his questioners, and seems absolutely possessed by a need to confess, then in the confessions to construct elaborate, self-justifying falsehoods. The $500,000 he originally admits to taking in kickbacks, for example, ultimately escalates into $11.5 million, a sum that stuns the FBI agents but which he blithely brushes off as a simple misunderstanding.

Matt Damon really carries the picture, bringing to the role of Mark Whitacre a disarming naivete that, oddly, exonerates him from all his falsehoods and misdeeds, which often seem only a product of his own earnest, well meaning enthusiasm. No matter how much or how frequently he deceives the audience, he always somehow earns a kind of forgiveness.

Despite Damon's performance, a generally entertaining script, and a sort of insistent good nature, "The Informant" depends far too much on discussions of certain events rather than showing the events themselves, a technique that helps create the constant deceptions but which also turns the movie into a long, repeated series of conversations. Whatever its other values, the progress of the plot suggests that the director forgot that movies should proceed as visual narrative rather than a series of talky scenes - it's not a play, after all, but a motion picture.

The Informant!

(R), directed by Steven Soderbergh

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