Film review

  • The Laundromat

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Soderbergh (2019)

    Money is what gets laundered in Steven Soderbergh’s satirical comedy-drama, which also takes filthy lucre to the cleaners.  Scott Z Burns’s screenplay is based on the journalist Jake Bernstein’s 2017 book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite.  Burns and Soderbergh use the Panama City law firm partners Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca as representatives of the many unacceptable faces of capitalism.  The Laundromat makes clear that the Mossack and Fonseca operations at the heart of the Panama Papers scandal that broke in April 2016 are the tip of the iceberg of off-shore tax schemes.  The film, on limited theatrical release before it starts streaming on Netflix in mid-October, hasn’t received great reviews and it’s not hard to see why.  The tone is unstable but The Laundromat often evinces a smug cynicism that gets in the way of righteous anger.  Its structure is a mess.  The failed enterprise involves a high-powered cast, one of whom makes the film more frustrating by suggesting how much better it could have been.

    The persisting presences – narrators to camera and usually in fantasy settings – are Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Fonseca (Antonio Banderas), with whom we’re on first name terms throughout.  At the start, Jürgen and Ramón appear in desert sands, dressed in evening suits, cocktails in hand.  They embark on a potted history – they share the screen with a bunch of cavemen at one point – of money, credit and avarice.  In the first part of The Laundromat, Soderbergh switches back and forth between the Jürgen-Ramón double act and the more naturalistic story of Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), a Michigan grandmother, whose holiday with her husband Joe (James Cromwell) on Lake George, New York is cut short by tragedy.  The tour boat taking the Martins and others on a lake trip capsizes.  Joe is one of around twenty passengers drowned.  His widow’s lawyer files a settlement claim with the boat firm’s insurance company, only to discover that company doesn’t really exist.  It’s been subsumed in a larger outfi and that outfit in a still larger one – these are what are termed ‘shell companies’.   Ellen, like me and probably many other viewers of The Laundromat, knows nothing of such arrangements but she does know she’s being cheated.  She determines to do something about it.

    Ellen finds out that one of the shells is registered on the Caribbean island of Nevis, a tax haven, and that a businessman there called Irvin Boncamper is connected with the set-up.  She travels to Nevis, armed only with Boncamper’s address – though, for a couple of screen minutes, Ellen is armed with something more.  We watch her stride purposefully into an office building in Nevis and start firing a rifle, demanding attention as a prelude to justice.  She then wakes in her seat on the plane flying her to the Caribbean.  In reality, she approaches the same office building more diffidently.  As she does so, a man (Jeffrey Wright) emerges from it.  She asks if he can point her in the direction of Boncamper and his business premises.  ‘I don’t know him,’ replies the man, whom we already know to be Boncamper.

    Even in the short time she’s on screen with James Cromwell, Meryl Streep is able to create a substantial sense of a long, happy marriage.  In a later, more extended sequence with her daughter (Melissa Rauch) and grandchildren in the Las Vegas apartment she’s hoping to buy with her insurance settlement, Ellen recalls the early days of her relationship with Joe – how he bought tickets for them to see Diana Ross at Caesar’s Palace.  It’s a well-written monologue, to which Streep brings vivid, enriching detail.  Ellen’s recollections are brutally interrupted by the arrival of an estate agent (Sharon Stone), who informs her the apartment has now been bought by Russians offering a much bigger price.  Although the Ellen episodes are very different in form and style from the Jürgen and Ramón ones, the contrast might have developed traction and synergy if Soderbergh had followed through the impact on a typical life of the moneymen’s blithe malpractice.  That’s not what happens, though.  Once she fails to make headway in Nevis, the script is very short of ideas of where Ellen can go next.  For too long, she’s absent from the film, replaced by a succession of transient characters.

    There’s been a foretaste of this in a couple of superfluous scenes of Boncamper’s home life but Soderbergh now sets to work in earnest to illustrate the geographical scope of the chicanery The Laundromat means to censure and the ethnic range of its beneficiaries.  He and Scott Burns do this through sarcastic sketches.  The first is set in a Los Angeles mansion, the home of Charles (Nonso Alonzie), a philandering African plutocrat, his wife (Nikki Amuka-Bird), their daughter (Jessica Allain) and, some of the time, the daughter’s college friend, with whom Charles is having an affair.  The second sketch takes place in China, where a British accountant (Matthias Schoenaerts) does business with, and is duped by, a politician’s wife (Rosalind Chao).  She displays the devilish cunning associated with Hollywood Chinese characters of many decades ago.

    The shift into portmanteau storytelling is a big mistake.  Except for Nikki Amuka-Bird’s, the acting in these sections is as shallow as the writing of them.  Matthias Schoenaerts, struggling to cope with a posh English accent, is bizarrely miscast.  Soderbergh expects the audience to share his loathing for all concerned but his attitude towards them is so dismissive they’re merely boring.   You feel relief when these people go as suddenly as they came – until they’re followed by something even worse.

    The narrative framework includes, as well as Mossack and Fonseca, bits of animation and chapter headings in the form of ‘Secrets’ of the workings of the capitalist world:  ‘The Meek Are Screwed’, and so on.  The combination feels like a pinch from the techniques and use of the Ryan Gosling character in Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) – a more thoroughly cynical and superficial film than The Laundromat but also a more adroit and focused one.   (It was at its weakest in the closing stages, when it began to insist it had a heart.)   In a skilful balancing act, Ryan Gosling made The Big Short’s narrator repellent and seductive at the same time.  As a result, you took notice of what he said.  Jürgen and Ramón, blatantly and utterly contemptible, are too easy to ignore – and the two men playing them induce the wrong kind of discomfort.  Gary Oldman, rattling off his lines in an extravagant cod-German accent, is an annoying showoff.  Antonio Banderas isn’t but he’s the wrong kind of actor for this kind of role.  He seems ill at ease, anxious to try and match Oldman’s sardonic verve.

    The dream sequence on the plane to Nevis is the closest Ellen comes to getting her own back on the villains of the piece but it’s a different matter for the actress who plays her.  The sudden death of a colleague results in a promotion for a bulky, bespectacled woman on the Mossack Fonseca staff, who takes over as signatory of countless dodgy documents on behalf of the company.   She turns out to be the (actually still unidentified) ‘John Doe’ who blew the whistle on Mossack Fonseca by handing documents to the German journalist who broke the Panama Papers story.  She also turns out to be Meryl Streep, who, at the very end of The Laundromat, removes her glasses and dark wig, followed by her grey Ellen wig.  Streep then speaks to camera, voicing on behalf of Soderbergh, Scott Burns and presumably herself, outrage at the corrupt systems the film has laid bare.

    This final flourish makes for a multiply awkward conclusion.  It’s one thing for an actor to take on a role in a film whose political message s/he strongly supports.  When an actor, especially one of this eminence, articulates the message in person, it isn’t just the fourth wall that’s broken in the process.  The show of undisguised sincerity violates our sense of the actor as medium.  It sits uneasily with the fun that Streep has had – and given us – in her undercover role.  It’s also an exploitation of star status, encouraging us to take The Laundromat more seriously because Meryl Streep, rather than either of the ordinary people she was pretending to be, is voicing its manifesto.

    This connects to another problematic aspect of the film – how Streep’s Panamanian office worker got her new job.  Her predecessor in it was a character called Mia Beltran (Brenda Zamora).  On her way home from work one day, Mia is killed in a freak accident.  Mia has to die in order for Soderbergh to give Streep something more to do, since the role of Ellen, wonderfully though she plays it, isn’t enough.  In other words, it’s Brenda Zamora, as much as Mia, who’s disposable:  another kind of systemic elitism is operating here.  The potentially happier evidence of Steven Soderbergh’s feeling he’s under-served Meryl Streep in The Laundromat is that they’ve already completed another film together.  Let Them All Talk, a comedy featuring Lucas Hedges and Dianne Wiest among others, is due for release in 2020.

    27 September 2019

  • Ad Astra

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Gray (2019)

    Ad Astra is set in ‘the near future’.  It’s a time ‘of hope and conflict’.  Humanity is on a quest for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe as a means to salvation.  So what else is new?  Not Max Richter’s portentous, vaguely sacred score.  Not the occasional, admittedly expressive images of astronaut figures tiny and alone in the dark immensity of the heavens.  And yet James Gray’s latest venture into genre film-making – this sci-fi drama follows his earnest reworking of the terrestrial exploration adventure movie in The Lost City of Z (2016) – is a curious piece of work.  It really is a space oddity.

    Gray sets out clearly and economically the converging personal and planetary crises that drive his story, co-written with Ethan Gross.  Astronaut Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) can’t connect with people, his wife Eve (Liv Tyler) included.  She walks out without their exchanging a word.  A series of unexplained power surges throughout the solar system is threatening life on Earth.  One of these surges kills Roy’s colleague while they’re doing mechanical work on the outside of an international space antenna and Roy only just survives.  He freefalls a long way, all the way to terra firma, his parachute opening in the nick of time.  US Space Command then summons Roy to inform him that the source of the power surges has been located, in the region of Neptune, and why he might be the man to solve the problem.

    Neptune is where the first manned expedition to find intelligent life in the solar system, known as the Lima Project, went missing several years previously.  Lima’s commanding officer, seen on video record of the expedition, was the celebrated spaceman H Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), Roy’s father.  Space Command top brass believes that McBride senior is still alive and Roy accepts a mission to travel to Mars, establish communication with his father from there, and dissuade him from continuing the potentially cataclysmic power surges he seems to be generating.  From the moment you first see Tommy Lee Jones’s rough-hewn face on a screen within the screen, and hear his invincibly witty voice, you want more of him – and for Jones and Brad Pitt to get a scene or two together.  It’s quite a trip for Pitt before they do, and not just in miles.

    Accompanied by his father’s former colleague Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), Roy takes a commercial flight to the moon, where the arrivals lounge doesn’t look so different from an airport one.  The false sense of normality is short-lived.  The group Roy and Pruitt are part of is ambushed by pirates who kill everyone except them.  Pruitt, in a bad way, is taken to intensive care at the Space Com lunar base and that’s the last we see of him.  Roy transfers to a Mars-bound craft, the Cepheus, which stops to investigate a distress signal received from a biological research space station.  Roy and the Cepheus captain look round the station, abandoned except for a baboon that Roy soon finds dining on the captain’s body.  Roy wins an extended set-to with the creature before returning to the Cepheus.  A power surge hits the craft just as it prepares to land on Mars; with the new captain too frightened to cope, Roy takes over the controls and completes the landing.  At the Martian Space Com base, he meets facility director Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga) and records voice messages to send to the Lima Project.

    Brad Pitt gives a facially magnetic and sensitive performance.  That it’s also a vocally monotonous one is hardly his fault:  Roy’s glum voiceover, of which there’s plenty, is designed to tell us how shut off he is from his feelings.  The upside of his blocked emotions is a steady nerve (reflected in an enviably low heart rate) and rational clarity that serve Roy well in the psychological evaluations he repeatedly undergoes, and passes, at different stages of his journey.  Recording a message intended for his father changes all that.  Roy goes off-script, sheds a tear and fails the evaluation that follows.  He’s informed that he’ll play no further part in the project:  his personal connection with Clifford places Roy and the mission at risk.  This only increases his determination to pursue it – so does what he learns from Helen Lantos.

    Born on Mars, Helen was the child of Lima Project crew members.  The classified footage she shows Roy reveals that the crew mutinied (out of a kind of extreme homesickness, as I understood it); Clifford, hellbent on continuing the Project’s work, turned off his crew’s life-support systems and they died.  Helen also tells Roy that a craft will shortly be leaving Mars to destroy the Lima Project station with nuclear explosives.  With her help, Roy sneaks on board the craft just before take-off.   Space Command instructs the crew to neutralise Roy.  In the struggle that follows, he kills them all and continues on his way to Neptune.  Left alone with his thoughts, he has plenty of time to mull over his failed marriage – and, even more, his father issues.

    At this stage, Ad Astra also is well on its way – to defying expectations.  It’s not the only recent high-profile science fiction movie to give personal relationships and tragedies back home their due:  the Sandra Bullock character’s bereavement and isolation in space worked in synergy in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013).   A difference between that film and James Gray’s, however, is that an appetite for human connection seemed to fuel Bullock’s resourceful fight to survive and, against all odds, return to Earth.  Brad Pitt’s motivation for battling his way to Neptune has a somewhat different human dimension.  Ryan Gilbey puts it amusingly well in his New Statesman review:  ‘Ad Astra is only really interested in reaching the planet Closure’.  Yet Gray’s thesis also seems – in the context of sci-fi cinema – more thoroughly regressive than Gilbey suggests.

    After spacewalking his way into the Lima Project station, Roy, once he’s planted the nuclear payload, wanders around the place for some time before encountering Clifford, the sole survivor there.  In the voice message he recorded on Mars, Roy recalled his father’s love of old movie musicals.  In the space station, he comes upon a screen playing the ‘I Got a Girl in Kalamazoo’ number in Orchestra Wives (1942).  (It calls to mind the Hello, Dolly! (‘Put on Your Sunday Clothes’) interlude in WALL-E.)   Roy also notices a glass-framed copy of a National Geographic cover asking the question ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’  The answer ‘YES YES YES’ is scrawled across the glass in big black letters that look a bit mad.  And that’s pretty well how James Gray presents H Clifford McBride, a man so intent on continuing the search for non-human life that he ended the lives of his dissenting crew.

    When Roy eventually tracks his father down, Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t disappoint.  He has a look of the Ancient of Days; Clifford, in response to Roy’s insisting it’s time to go home, protests that he has ‘infinite work to do’.  Whether he has delusions of godhead or just a lust for alien life, he’s the incarnation of a formidable father figure it would be easy to have a hang-up about.  Even though James Gray doesn’t describe Roy’s unresolved feelings about Clifford in any detail, Ryan Gilbey rightly implies that, by now, they’ve taken emotional centre stage.  When Clifford explains the surges are coming from the space station’s damaged anti-matter power source, it no longer seems to matter much.  Even when the station finally explodes, you don’t experience this as good news for the solar system.  More important is that the shock waves generated by the explosion help propel Roy, who’s short of fuel, safely homewards.  He’s alone.  Clifford, after reluctantly agreeing to return to Earth, soon changes his mind.  Roy yields to his father’s desperate plea to be allowed to float off into infinity.

    Their brief, unsatisfactory encounter was evidently enough to get the father out of his son’s head.  Once he gets home, Roy also prepares to re-start his marriage:  he and Eve smile at each other (though Liv Tyler still doesn’t get any lines).  The emotional resolution and reconciliation are banally unconvincing.  What stops Ad Astra‘s ending from being laughably weak is the supposed reason for Roy’s change of heart.  Data retrieved from the Lima Project answers the National Geographic question in the negative.  I didn’t get whether this answer applied to just our solar system or further out in space (and, if the latter, how the Lima Project could have found that out).  Whatever, it’s enough for Roy to decide that, if humans are the sole intelligent life around, then we’d better make the best of each other.  He journeys billions of miles to come to terms with his father and appreciate his wife.  It’s hard to resist the thought that a few hours in psychotherapy would have done just as well.

    There’s a correspondence between the hero’s prodigious yet prodigal efforts and the film that describes them.  As major studio sci-fi pictures go, this one wasn’t that expensive.  The budget of $80m-$100m was around half that of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), for example (according to Wikipedia figures for both movies).   Even so, Ad Astra verges on being a high-budget project:  it goes almost without saying that it needs the appearance of money well spent.  It doesn’t disappoint in that respect – it’s a work of visual ambition and distinction.  (The DP is Hoyte van Hoytema, who also shot Interstellar.)   Yet it not only crystallises into a familiar story of a son’s struggle with the legacy of a dominating – and, to make matters worse, famous – father.  It also suggests that travel into deep space, to try and achieve what the Lima Project set out to achieve, is a waste of time and resources, and bound to end in tears.  If this is what James Gray is suggesting, he’s taking a harsh view of what’s essentially an expression of humankind’s ineradicable, unsatisfied need to discover meaning in the Universe.  He’s right, though, that it’s an expression of this need that comes at a high price.  Like Hollywood movie-making.  Gray invests his budget in making an interplanetary wild goose chase look good.

    Roy McBride’s demented father could be seen as the representative of an older generation obsessed with the search for extraterrestrial life.  Perhaps the representative of our generation:  this is, after all, ‘the near future’.  But what does Ad Astra‘s no-place-like-home message mean for the future of big-screen sci-fi?   Though this isn’t a question of urgent importance to those of us who prefer cinema that deals with human rather than ET relationships, it does make you wonder what a science fiction aficionado will make of Gray’s film.  It looks, it sounds and, for a time, it behaves like a sci-fi movie yet it amounts to something approaching an anti-sci-fi manifesto.  The title suggests onwards and upwards.  The moral of its story brings Ad Astra down to Earth.

    26 September 2019

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