Hi, I'm Dana Steven Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate Spoiler Special podcast on The Informant, the new Steven Soderberg movie.

I'm here remotely speaking. We're trying our first taping from home remote podcast with Dan Cois. How are you, Dan?

Hey, Dana. How are you? I'm also speaking remotely from Washington, D.C.

Where you are, a critic at the Washington Post?

Correct, and a contributing writer at New York Magazine.

So, as we were just saying before we start, we're not sure we can guarantee the sound quality of this podcast.

But it's an experiment, and we're going to see how it works, and hopefully it'll allow us to do a lot more podcast from DC with Dan. So Dan, we did not see the informant together.

I think that you like the movie a little bit more than I did.

I have a lot of questions and expressions of bafflement about it, but I think it's got some good

style going to.

Do you want to start off with the plot summary?

Sure.

Well, we'll at least get into a little bit. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitaker, who is a high-level

executive at Archer Daniels Midland. We should say the whole movie is based on a nonfiction book

about, you know, a real corporate scandal. Right, by Kurt Econvald. The movie is set in Decatur,

Illinois, mostly, and sort of other places around the Midwest where

Archer Daniels Midland is based.

And Whitaker is a former scientist-turned vice president at Archer Daniels Midland, who, in the

course of his everyday duties becomes disenchanted, it seems, with some things that are going

out of the company company and ends up

becoming a whistleblower for the FBI and two FBI agents played by the dearly beloved Scott Bacula

and Joel McHale from the soup take him under their wing and lead him through the process

...