Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! may be an ingenious filmic experiment—a cinematic trompe l’oeil. It’s a modern retooling of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), with the schizoid circus-freak somnambulist wearing a white collar and a Middle American cornfed grin. Caligari, which explained away its zig-zagging Expressionism by putting the camera behind the eyes of a wacko, was a trick. The Informant! is also a joke. We can sit back in retrospect and laugh at being duped, but it’s not funny enough while you watch it to be worth the cheat.

The story is based on Kurt Eichenwald’s reportage about Mark Whitacre, a division president at the agricultural giant Arthur Daniels Midland. Scared that he may become a scapegoat, he tattled on the international price-fixing ring that he and the other executives habitually partook in; inadvertently, however, he blew the whistle on his own spate of fraudulent behavior. To the F.B.I., he presented himself as a down-home American hero—a scientist in the corrupting sphere of big-time corn-syrup malfeasance—and now he’s being embodied in a big-time movie by a big-time star, Matt Damon. But Damon has 30 extra pounds swishing between his hips, and his girth is accompanied by equally unflattering glasses, a hot-mess toupee, and a porn-star mustache that seems vintage 1973 (though the story is set between 1992 and 2006). He isn’t fat, but he’s squat, and Damon stays proficiently in character, showing off his inner nebbish with a ducky gait, nervous toothiness, and some Midwestern twang in his voice. Damon does well; he’s always been a likable actor because his pretty-boy face betrays an innate self-effacement. I don’t think he’s trying for condescension here, but his self-deprecation leaves little else left beneath the mannerisms. It’s as if Whitacre’s self-deception had depleted his own soul, reduced him to instinctual nervousness. Damon is probably up against the same thing that Christian Bale was in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, in which he flailed about portraying an essentially soulless character—also based on a real person.

Some artists, wisely, rely on intuition, and let their feelings develop as they work through a project. I think Soderbergh, and the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns (who wrote a very divergent part for Damon in the Bourne movies), are trying to be nonjudgmental. But forced objectivity can become like a condom that reins in artistry; Soderbergh has pulled the wool over our eyes, but his seem wrapped in sheepskin, too. And he doesn’t have the gift that Terry Gilliam (or Rian Johnson) has for discomfiting us and then making us laugh at our confusion. Brazil was about a functionary confronted by an insuperable bureaucracy, as shown from the individual’s point of view; in The Informant!, we see a nutty individual befuddle multiple bureaucracies. We look at Whitacer’s foibles and ask ourselves, “Is he serious?” But the consequences are shown to us as paperwork. The filmmakers’ objectivity is conceptual: It serves the big payoff. But they loose sight of the details—the little jokes that make the payoff worthwhile. We get too many revelations in dry staff meetings, where talented comedians are stuck speaking in jargon, and seem shackled to prim business suits.

Having the likes of Patton Oswalt, Candy Clark, Tony Hale, and even the Smothers brothers (who embody the era that the psychedelic production design misleadingly invokes) play it straight is indeed a joke; but after our initial recognition of these misplaced luminaries, we stop laughing. Melanie Lynskey gives us the cream filling of a candy-coated American wife with tender shades of melancholy; Scott Bakula, as an F.B.I. agent, seems immanently loose and sympathetic (with a droopy, Bush-like visage that indicates incompetence); and it’s fun to see Joel McHale (of The Soup on E!) use his smarminess to evoke an Arrow-collar G-man of the J. Edgar Hoover years (which, again, do not encompass those in which the movie is set). But this is Damon’s show—from Whitacre’s eyes. (Does he need Visine? Maybe that’s why everything’s so dry…) Burns’s most ingenious contribution is the voiceover—a free-association scat which Damon yammers off hilariously. But the only other sources of humor are a few mildly timed espionage slip-ups, the escalating circumstances, and the way we foolishly, instinctively trust the whistleblower every time, only to have him let us down yet again. The Informant! is less a black comedy than a sunny-skies downer. The jokes are all in the filmmakers’ heads.

I don’t mind that Soderbergh toys with us so much as I mind how he does it—boringly. We hear a series of exorbitant figures accompanied by the shocked expression of some power-at-be, and the cheekily ironic musical equivalent on the soundtrack. I think we’re supposed to end up confused about how we feel about Whitacre, but we just feel miffed; the whole movie has betrayed us, giving us a chameleon instead of a character. Soderbergh’s lack of conviction—except in tricking the audience—seems to have left everyone drained. Some of the filmmakers’ attitudes leak out, but the seepage is indiscriminate, so it only leads to more flippancy. Part of Soderbergh wants us to say, “Whitacre sure turned the tables on us!” But other parts of him imply “Shit, did he really just do that to himself?” or “Big business screws with us all!” The film becomes a Rorschach test for critics, a tease to those banking on Soderbergh’s reputation for having something to say.

For instance, Manohla Dargis, in the New York Times, believes that anti-corporate “anger fuels The Informant!, giving it its pulse and reason for being,” whereas David Edelstein, of New York magazine, thinks the filmmakers are “utterly uninterested in corporate misbehavior and its ramifications,” and thus present “Whitacre as the wacked-out soul of corporate America.” Perhaps at the heart of this is Soderbergh’s own claim that he “wasn’t really interested in hearing what everyone involved [in Whitacre’s case] thought [Whitacre’s] actions meant. … I wanted people to be immersed in what it was to be like him.” But I think Soderbergh has mistaken how Whitacre sees himself with the educated-liberal audience’s view of Whitacre, and the director’s own subjective feelings toward the man. The voiceover is inconsistent—are we hearing his thoughts, or is he talking to us? There’s also the matter of the music (Marvin Hamlisch’s score evokes the kitsch of multiple eras) and the photography (which is blown out and orangey—as if soaked in corn syrup). All the elements seem to be scoring satirical points off Whitacre; did the filmmakers think this man saw himself as a stereotype—Mr. Phony-Baloney American Dream?

In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, a chronicle of Soderbergh’s generation of independent filmmakers, the director recalls the genesis for his sex, lies, and videotape: “I was involved in a relationship with a woman in which I was deceptive and mentally manipulative. … I just became somebody that, if I knew them, I would hate.” According to Biskind, “Had [Soderbergh] been able, he would, he said, have joined a twelve-step program for recovering liars.” I think Whitacre’s story—that of an intelligent family man who, on one level, is an earnest do-gooder, and on another, a self-destructive double-, triple-, quadruple-crosser—must have impacted Soderbergh on a very personal level. The Informant! could be an autobiographical misfire: Soderbergh’s cold distance may reflect his own ambivalence about liars—his own self-reproaches back him away from his subject. You leave feeling parched, and that’s the punchline. Fun, right? It’s a shame, if that’s the case; Soderbergh pulls off the unreliable narrator, but, with his talent, he could have pulled off a lot more. The story must have glowed on paper like a cornfield at sunset. But once the Americana corn husks are shucked away, all that’s left are kernels desiccated by the drought.