You know those situations you get into when you should be paying attention but your mind wanders off onto something else? Say someone is trying to explain what you should say in an important meeting, but because you were thinking about the migration patterns of geese, you miss everything that the person was trying to tell you. This is basically the life of Mark Whitacre, Matt Damon’s hapless mole turned corporate conman in director Steven Soderbergh’s new comedy “The Informant!.” Even though Mark sits through many an important meeting as he aids in a federal investigation into a world-wide price-fixing scheme, he seems to spend most of his time thinking about polar bears or neck ties. The film is based on Kurt Eichenwald’s true-crime novel, and Soderbergh (director of  “Ocean’s 11,” ” Ocean’s 12″ and “Ocean’s 13″) manages to take a potentially grim story of corporate greed and play the whole thing off as a comic farce.

If “The Informant!” was a typical work of fiction, its ridiculous twists and playful tone of affable incompetence wouldn’t resonate, but because it recants the actual events surrounding the Archer Daniels Midland price-fixing conspiracy of the mid-1990s and company VP Mark Whitacre’s turn from company scapegoat to high profile whistle-blower, the film’s bombastic inanity becomes disturbingly hilarious.

Soderbergh stacks his cast with a broad range of comic actors. Aside from Damon, who plays Whitacre with all the sensibilities of a cartoon character, the film features the likes of Patton Oswalt, Tom Papa and Tony Hale (“Arrested Development”). None of them play particularly funny roles, in fact most of them play lawyers, but their mere presence in Soderbergh’s lampoon dismantles our gut feelings about those involved in white collar crime. In Sorderburgh’s world, these men aren’t mustache twirling super-villains out to swindle money from the pockets of American consumers; they’re over-eager clowns, witlessly padding their bank accounts with whatever money they can find. The bad fashion and clunky technology of the mid-1990s doesn’t help matters, as the brick-like cell phones, bad ties and gold-rimmed glasses just makes you wonder how these buffoons got so much power to begin with.

Whitacre himself is difficult to read. His complete inability to take direction or tell the truth leaves most everyone that encounters him writhing with frustration, gaping incredulously at his ability to screw up practically everything he does. When you think about it, there isn’t a whole lot to like about Mark Whitacre. He’s a cowardly, self-serving dweeb who only hopes to bring down the ADM higher ups out of an effort to take the company for himself. Hardly a word he says bears a slightest bit of truth to it, and he seems more than happy to cruise around in European sports cars that he bought with embezzled money. But Damon makes Whitacre seem like the world’s most earnest pathological liar; a kind of corporate man-child that is all too giddy to play spy for the feds while he recklessly siphons millions from the company. Even at the end of the film, as the fog of Whitacre’s deception begins to dissipate and we learn the extent of his greed, you still want to like the big lug. As he gets himself into more and more trouble, you start to get the feeling that, even though Whitacre racks up some forty-odd felony charges, he just wants to do what’s best for everyone.

“The Informant!” succeeds in being a consistently funny film when it clearly shouldn’t be. Even with Damon’s digression-laden narration and Marvin Hamlisch’s jaunty 1970s score, Soderbergh manages to bring to light the injustices that white-collar criminals get away with. While the heads of ADM, who made countless millions of dollars at the expense of consumers, get off with a three-year jail term, Mark Whitacre suffered in prison three times as long despite being the key to bringing ADM down. The film leaves you feeling like most people that come into contact with Mark Whitacre: utterly dumbstruck with your jaw dangling in the wind.

Beer Pairing: Like Mark Whitacre painstakingly points out early on in “The Informant!,” corn is in everything these days. It sweetens our sodas, it fattens our livestock, and it’s even made its way into our beer. Archeologists found that Pueblo Indians would brew beer using corn, proving that Native Americans had alcohol long before the Spanish arrived with grapes and wine. Finnish brewery Sinebrychoff celebrates this Pueblo heritage with Koff Wild Indian Corn Beer, a lager which is really just made with corn syrup. Typical.