Guevara, Chelsea, and Whitacre are linked as humans adrift in overwhelming systems in which they find, at the juncture of the individual and the world, greed, alienation, boredom, and the often murky lines that separate heroism from hubris and selfishness from selflessness. It’s hard to imagine a succession of more wildly divergent films that nevertheless assert themselves, unambiguously, as the moral work of a single director.

The Informant! might be called a tragicomedy if it weren’t for the grandiose dimensions the term implies. For where tragedy connotes Leer, Mark Whitacre is all Loman—this is American prosperity as Sad Farce. It’s a tale of white collar crime that relentlessly undermines any attempt at high drama. There’s Marvin Hamlisch’s campy score, highlighting with retro string swells just how undramatic these fluorescent hallways and white-board earnings meetings really are. And then there are the supporting roles, where Soderbergh casts as FBI agents and corporate executives a troupe of contemporary comedians who are maybe the only people in the world more angry than filmmakers. The casting has a strangely visual logic to it: To watch Patton Oswald in an oversized suit opine to a boardroom of FBI agents what constitutes, pragmatically speaking, prosecutable economic fraud, or to listen to Tom Papa as Whitacre’s boss threaten, “You tell me. I’ll tell my Dad.”—it looks like kids playing dress-up as adults they don’t respect. If that sounds glib or flippant, that’s only because it’s cynical.

It’s all shot with an eye for mundane beauty. As is the case with all of his movies, Soderbergh (here credited as Peter Andrews) is cinematographer as well as director. The story unfolds against landscapes of America’s heartland—shots of Holiday Inns, and office parks, and fallow corn fields, and the sort of vast, half-empty parking lots that surround development wherever land is cheap. The camera rarely moves but often lingers a few awkward beats after the fact in the fluorescent-lit offices where most of the action takes place. It brings to mind the work of another great documentarian of the empty spaces between the coasts: William Eggleston’s washed-out landscapes of Tennessee with the hyper-saturated reds and yellows bleeding in the stark, eerie beauty of America’s suburban and industrial South. It’s enough to wonder if it might be more than coincidence.