The Informant! I was led to believe there’d be righteous indignation. This movie denies us our retribution. And yet for cynics craving a smart, cathartic exegesis of emptiness and avarice in corporate America, you’d be hard pressed to find any poison more satisfying than Capitalism, a Love…I mean, The Informant!

Based on journalist Kurt Eichenwald’s exhaustively researched book of the same name, the movie is ostensibly about a major price fixing scandal at agricultural behemoth ADM, a corporation that produces and distributes the food near the bottom of your longer ingredients lists, and one that pulls the strings in our global economy in the way that only real power can—in total obscurity. But the conspiracy only provides the context for the real story here, which hinges on the lovably deranged ADM employee turned covert FBI informant, Mark Whitacre, a man with more secrets than the company he is trying, for some reason, to expose.

Following the publication of the book, Whitacre was featured in an episode of This American Life, in which Ira Glass’s telling of the tale reflects in its similarities to the movie just how subtly Soderbergh has warped the raw material. In the radio segment, as in the film, the comedy derives easily from Whitacre’s bizarre behavior and from the dumbfounded reactions he elicits from a slew of executives, FBI agents, and lawyers caught in his wake. It is a portrait, mainly, of an odd man gone awry, and as such, remains an isolated, if bizarre and humorous tale. But the film broadens the scope, and while the story still belongs to Whitacre, Soderbergh locates the heart of The Informant! deeper in the facts, digging into an unsettling structural absurdity that lies beneath even its main character’s delusions. He finds there not just bad haircuts and deadening gray offices where white collar drama takes place—but also the pettiness of  major crime, the banality of real-world intrigue, the smallness of big men. The Informant! is the story of a system as much as it is the story of a man.

It’s a particularly compelling angle from a director whose recent films are linked as variations on this common theme. Like Che Guevara [Benicio del Toro] in his eponymous Che films and Chelsea [Sasha Grey] in his subsequent The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh’s Mark Whitacre is a character lost in his context. While Matt Damon brings dead-pan absurdity to the role, he also brings genuine pathos to a man who feels as much a lost soul as he does a delusional corporate climber. He is oddly likeable, even lovable, not simply for his clumsy innocence, but also for his eyes, which betray a smart and vulnerable person who’s been warped.  To watch him claw desperately, without betraying fear, as his lies spiral out of control, as a stable suburban world crashes around him, it’s hard to not recall a similarly stoic Che Guevarra wandering through the Chilean jungle, pursuing a futile and violent fight, blinded to the human cost of war by the relentless pursuit of his own fantastic vision. Like Whitacre, only his eyes betray human doubt. Or the stoic Chelsea, wandering through that other jungle in Manhattan, selling herself—and it’s more than just her body—in pursuit of warped definitions of success that are shared by the powerful men who court her, who buy intimacy in addition to sex. Again, doubt lingers only in her eyes.