ALL WASHED UP
The Laundromat’s sloppy script makes for some unfocused storytelling
Director Steven Soderbergh seldom repeats himself — well, except for those Ocean’s movies — but if you want to know the nearest thing he’s done to The Laundromat, consider 2009’s The Informant!, starring Matt Damon as a vice-president/ whistleblower inside a agribusiness conglomerate.
Like that movie, The Laundromat deals with corporate malfeasance, albeit on an even larger scale — the Panama Papers that are its subject comprised a leak of more than 11 million documents that implicated thousands of people engaged in fraud, tax evasion and other crimes.
You might expect some of the all-star performers — Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, Gary Oldman, Sharon Stone, Jeffrey Wright, etc. — to be playing crusading journalists or investigators, but in fact most of them are cast as bad guys, and the remainder as helpless victims.
Streep is in the latter camp as Ellen Martin, a retiree whose husband (James Cromwell) is killed in a freak boating accident. When her settlement proves minuscule thanks to a scandal in the insurance industry that also swamps the boat owner (David Schwimmer), she becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth behind shell companies.
That’s just one of a bewildering number of subplots that sees new characters being introduced well into the film’s second half — Matthias Schoenaerts as a shady fixer for a wealthy Chinese family, for instance — while others (Schwimmer, or Wright as a minor functionary on the Caribbean island of Nevis) just disappear. The Laundromat may be “based on actual secrets,” as
the opening credits say, but it’s also filmed from a sloppy script.
Guiding viewers through it are Banderas and Oldman as Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack, the smooth-talking co-founders of the Panamanian law firm at the centre of the scandal. Oldman may be one of the foremost screen chameleons of our age, but his faux-German accent bears an unfortunate resemblance to “Swedish Guy” from the Ikea radio ads.
They’re amusing, but their shtick seemed like a pale imitation of Adam McKay’s superior movie The Big Short from 2015. And I was also thrown back again to The Informant!, in which Soderbergh kept viewers off balance by casting comic actors like Patton Oswalt and the Smothers brothers as straight characters in supporting roles.
There’s a bit of that in The Laundromat — comedian Larry Wilmore as a lawyer in one scene, Will Forte and Chris Parnell in a throwaway bit about two gringos in the wrong place at the wrong time — but here it just adds to the general unfocused nature of the narrative, which also includes a couple of fourth-wall breaks for good measure.
And it’s never a good sign when I’ve got time to parse a movie’s chapter headings. “Secret 1: The Meek Are Screwed.” “Secret 2: It’s All Shells.” “Secret 3: Tell a Friend.” Um, sorry, but that’s not a secret; it’s advice. It’s like when a “fortune” cookie delivers an axiom instead.