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
