Movie Review: The Laundromat

The Laundromat ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh.

Written by: Scott Z. Burns based on the book by Jake Bernstein.

Starring: Gary Oldman (Jürgen Mossack), Antonio Banderas (Ramón Fonseca), Meryl Streep (Ellen Martin), Sharon Stone (Hannah), Melissa Rauch (Melanie), David Schwimmer (Matthew Quirk), James Cromwell (Joe Martin), Robert Patrick (Captain Perry), Matthias Schoenaerts (Maywood), Jeffrey Wright (Malchus Irvin Boncamper), Rosalind Chao (Gu Kailai), Nonso Anozie (Charles), Brenda Zamora (Mia Beltran), Miracle Washington (Astrid), Jessica Allain (Simone), Larry Wilmore (Jeff), David Schwimmer (Matthew Quirk), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Miranda).

 

I have to admit, I’m a little at a loss in trying to figure out what exactly Steven Soderbergh was going for with The Laundromat. Since his “return” to filmmaking with 2017’s Logan Lucky which marked his coming out of “retirement”, it seems like Soderbergh is more interested in experimenting than anything else. Logan Lucky was his attempt to make a different kind of Ocean’s 11-esque heist comedy/drama, Unsane was his (very underrated to me) attempt to make a film on an iPhone, seeing what could be done, and his first Netflix film of 2019 – High Flying Bird – was a film about disruption, made with disruptive technology, and released on the disruptive streaming service. And now comes The Laundromat which may best be described as Soderbergh attempting to ape Adam McKay’s The Big Short, with The Panama Papers in place of the 2008 stock market crash. And yet, even after watching this film, I kind of don’t feel as if I have any real handle on The Panama Papers themselves, or what exactly drew Soderbergh to this story of the rich acting like greedy assholes. The film has an extremely talented cast – including the world’s greatest actress, Meryl Streep, but strands them in a disjointed film with more side trips than plot. McKay and company found a way to turn Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book into a narrative film. Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (whose much better directorial film, The Report, comes out this fall) fails to do the same with Jake Bernstein’s book. It feels like every time The Laundromat is just warming up, we cut to something else for 15-minute detour.

 

The film opens with two lawyers - Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) – who were at the heart of The Panama Papers scandal – breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience about the invention of credit – and how that started everything. They will be a constant presence throughout the film, trying to break down complex financial issues that basically boil down to this – the rich can do whatever they want. They have shell companies inside of shell companies, all located in places with favorable laws, that allow them to do whatever the hell they want and get away with it. You get screwed over and want to sue – good luck with that, you’re likely just to find a now worthless shell company, that never really existed, administered by someone who won’t answer the phone.

 

This is what Ellen Martin (Streep) finds out when her husband – and 20 other people – are killed in a boating accident. This should mean a big payout, but it turns out that the boating company got their insurance from one of these places who is owned by a shell of a shell of a shell, and they won’t pay – so she ends up with next to nothing. She keeps on digging however to try and find out more information, and just gets increasingly frustrated. Then throughout the film, we see more stories – mostly of the rich and powerful – who can use these things as weapons, like Charles (Noso Anozie), a wealth African who is sleeping with his daughter’s college roommate, and tries to get himself out of trouble with her (and keep his wife from finding out) using bearer shares – without quite telling them what that actually means. There’s another vignette of a wealthy Englishman (Matthias Schoenaerts) who tries to use what he knows to blackmail a powerful Chinese woman (Rosalind Chao) and sees what that gets him. Or the story of Malchus Irvin Boncamper (Jeffrey Wright), who leaves on a tropical island, and signs all the papers for these worthless companies.

 

You can hardly fault the cast here – who seem to be trying, but other than Oldman, Banderas and Streep, they aren’t on screen long enough to really do much with their characters. Streep is probably in the movie too much – after a while, there isn’t much for her to do, and they try to fool you by putting her under a bad wig and makeup, and donning a horrible accent (when you know Streep could do any accent imaginable) just to keep her around. There is a smugness to the scenes with Oldman and Banderas that is probably appropriate given who they are playing – but that doesn’t make it much more interesting to watch. And it all comes to a close with a bizarre call to arms, that feels fairly disingenuous.

 

I’m sure that all involved had the best of intentions with this film – that they wanted to expose the secrets of the rich, powerful and greedy – and doesn’t even mind pointing out some of their own hypocrisy (at one point, Oldman mentions that people set up companies in Delaware to avoid taxes – including “the director of this film, who has five”). What they never quite figured out thought is how to make this all interesting for an audience. The Panama Papers is something we all heard about – it was a major scandal, and yet how often did anyone do a deep dive into them? There is a reason for that – it’s rather dry, even for someone like me who likes economics and no matter how Soderbergh and company dress it up, they cannot change that.