So this is inflatable what Matt Damon has been keeping bottled up during all those taciturn hours playing Jason Bourne. In Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Damon plays--and plays very, very well--a character in every way the opposite of his efficient, amnesiac superspy: a babbling bumbler who goes undercover for the FBI to gather information against his own employer but winds up exposing mostly himself. Forget Soderbergh's earlier Erin Brockovich; this is a portrait of the whistleblower as pipsqueak.

A biochemist by training, Mark Whitacre (Damon) has ascended to the inflatable bouncer upper echelons of agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)--and, in the process, gotten in well over his head. When a project he's overseeing (which involves synthesizing lysine for use in corn sweeteners) begins falling behind, he tells his superiors that he's received phone calls from a competitor informing him that an internal mole is undermining the program. The truth? A stall? It's not entirely clear, but the corporate brass decide to bring in the FBI, which is not at all what Whitacre had had in mind. Worried that the Bureau might stumble upon ADM's nasty habit of price-fixing, Whitacre promptly spills the beans on his bosses, which is not at all what they'd had in mind. Soon enough, he's wearing a wire for the feds and, in his mind, likening his undercover antics to those of Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Indeed, much of the drama in The Informant! takes place in Whitacre's mind and, as the film progresses, the divergences between his internal reality and the external one become more and more evident. It's not that he's delusional, at least not in the hallucinatory sense; it's that he's exceptionally good at self-justification, and at distracting himself from his own misdemeanors. He lacks both intellectual and moral focus, retreating constantly into an internal monologue of ADD discursions--on the inflatable castles best place to buy neckties, the pronunciation of "Porsche," and, most hilariously, the problems posed by the polar bear's black nose. Whitacre's mind is, as the song goes, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel. I haven't had this much fun watching an actor talk to himself since, well, the last two or three Robert Downey Jr. movies.

The script is based on Kurt Eichenwald's nonfiction book The Informant--the film adds the exclamation point merely to denote comedy, not a musical, though one wonders what possibilities the latter genre might have opened up. While the events portrayed took place in the early-to-mid-1990s, Soderbergh has given the film a deliberately 1970s vibe, with funky opening titles and a Marvin Hamlisch score--his first in 13 years--that's a dizzy, inventive triumph, a throwback pastiche of whistling, tubas, and kazoos.

But beyond its aesthetics, The Informant! has a 1970s brand of humor, too: wry, not riotous; content to find its laughs in the context of the story; gliding on a wave of chuckles rather than striving desperately for hilarity. It may be the funniest movie in five years without (as best I can recall) a single gag related to bodily functions. It resembles in inflatable slides some ways last year's Burn After Reading, another comedy out of step with prevailing conventions. But where the Coens' film went dark, Soderbergh's opts for light. Even as his tapestry of fibs is unraveling, the upbeat Whitacre enthuses, "There are so many really nice people in the world."

Sharp supporting performances are turned in by Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Tony Hale, Tom Papa, and others. There are even small roles for Tom and  Smothers--another period nod. And Soderbergh knits it all together with quiet grace, offering what is probably his most artfully realized film since at least 2001's Ocean's Eleven (though I confess I have not yet made it through the dozen reels of Che).

It's Damon's film, though, and he occupies his equivocating antihero utterly, capturing the Walter Mittyish self-delusion, the desperate desire to please, and the inflatable water games bottomless conviction that, whatever his transgressions, he's still one of the good guys. In the end it's really not true, but he may have you believing it with him all the same.

Christopher Orr is a senior editor of The New Republic.

"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed union, none deserves to pearl jewelry sets be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction," James Madison wrote in Federalist Number 10. "The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice." Consider us alarmed.

Our sense of alarm has been growing for some time. From the pearl jewelry China moment Barack Obama entered the White House, the Republican Party has cast itself as the Party of No. Whether it was the stimulus bill--which garnered not a single Republican vote in the House--or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court--which only nine of 40 Senate Republicans supported--the GOP has defined itself in its opposition to Obama. But our alarm has been tempered by the knowledge that, in a way, this is as it should be: In our form of government, the minority party should be the opposition party; and, while the Obama administration did make overtures to the GOP on the stimulus and its selection of Sotomayor, those overtures were largely symbolic. The factionalism, while regrettable, was understandable. But, this week, as the health care reform battle reached a crucial juncture, the violence of faction has become gratuitous.

We refer, of course, to Max Baucus's long-awaited health care reform bill--and the resounding thud with which it landed on Capitol Hill. There are many flaws in Baucus's bill, but there is one thing that can be said for it: It represents as sincere an attempt in recent memory to achieve consensus. For the last three months, Baucus, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, worked with five other committee members--two Democrats and three Republicans--to draft legislation that could garner bipartisan support. As the leader of the so-called "Gang of Six," Baucus was the silver pearl jewelry target of frequent criticism from fellow Democrats, who complained that he was taking too long in drafting his legislation or that he was being too solicitous of Republicans. And, while these criticisms had merit, Baucus labored to come up with a bill that represented at least a rough compromise.

In almost Solomonic fashion, Baucus crafted a bill that gives something to--and takes something away from—each faction. Virtually every industry group--from hospitals to drugmakers to device manufacturers to insurers—that faces new fees or budget cuts in the Baucus bill is rewarded with additional revenue from the legislation. And, when it came to winning over Republicans, Baucus went more than halfway: eliminating the public option, strengthening protections against federal funding of abortions, and lowering the legislation's price tag.

And what did all of Baucus's efforts get him? Well, from most key interest groups, outright support or, at the very least, not much indication of outright opposition. But, from one of the two major political parties that, theoretically at least, is supposed to represent many of those interest groups? Absolutely no Republican support--not even from the three GOP members of the Gang of Six, two of whom (Mike Enzi and Chuck Grassley) voiced their outright opposition and one (Olympia Snowe) who remains on the fence.

To be sure, Baucus's bill failed to elicit much in the pearl jewelry wholesale way of Democratic support, either. Jay Rockefeller, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, announced that he would vote against Baucus's bill as drafted. But it's not hard to imagine Democratic critics ultimately supporting the bill—especially if, as appears likely, changes are made and Obama encourages them to do so.

Alas, there appears little chance that any Republicans will be similarly moved. Already, Orrin Hatch, the number two Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is demanding that Democrats "take a deep breath and start over on a truly bipartisan bill"--as if Baucus's legislation was something else entirely. And there is no Republican figure who appears capable of rallying the GOP to the side of health reform.

The Republican reception of Baucus's bill doesn't so much represent a crisis for health care reform as it does a crisis for our system. The GOP is no longer representing interest groups; rather, it has become an interest group itself--and an implacable one. So that a compromise piece of legislation that achieves a rough consensus among the various factions in the debate fails to get even one vote from one of the two major parties.

Where to go from here? Having failed to win over Republicans, Baucus should now labor to wholesale pearl jewelry win over Democrats. If that means having Massachusetts appoint an interim replacement for Ted Kennedy's seat--or even passing some of the reform through reconciliation--then so be it. If Max Baucus's months of work achieved nothing else, he has unmasked the true nature of the contemporary GOP and, in the process, revealed just how broken our political system has become.