‘Panama Papers’ star Streep says ‘Laundromat’ is fun, timely
VENICE: The world’s richest people are playing a “black-hearted joke on all of us” Hollywood star Meryl Streep said on Sunday as a new movie based on the Panama Papers scandal was premiered.
The American actress plays a cheated widow out to right financial chicanery in “Laundromat”, a det satire on the maze of shell companies that criminals and the super-rich use to hide their billions.
“This movie is fun and it’s funny, but it’s really important,” Streep told reporters at the Venice film festival.
Director Steven Soderbergh shows how the massive 2016 leak of documents from the Panama law firm Mossack & Fonseca exposed the lengths the rich and powerful go to avoid paying tax — mostly legally.
It sent shock waves across the world when the off-shore dealings of leaders in a string of countries were exposed, leading to the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davio Gunnlaugsson.
But rather than casting the firm’s partners as shady baddies, Soderbergh lets the pair — played by British actor Gary Oldman and Spanish star Antonio Banderas — dig their own graves by telling it from their point of view.
“This is a funny way to tell a black-hearted joke, a joke that’s been played on all of us,” Streep told reporters in Venice.
“But it’s a crime not without victims, and many of them are journalists. The reason the Panama Papers were exported out to the world was the work of journalists.
“People died because of this,” Streep said, referring to the Maltese columnist Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a bomb attack in 2017 ater taking part in the Panama Papers investigation.
Soderbergh, the maker of classics such as “Sex, Lies and Videotape”, “Traffic”, “Erin Brockovich” and the “Ocean’s” trilogy, said he hoped the Netflix film would increase pressure for real change.
“Along with climate change, this kind of corruption is the defining issue of this moment. In 2000 the top 1 percent controlled a third of the world’s wealth. They now control half.
“That does not seem sustainable and yet here we are. Transparency is the only solution,” he added.
In the film Soderbergh admits that five companies he has been involved with have been registered in the low-tax US state of Delaware, where more than quarter of a million shell companies are registered to a single address.
The director hailed the new Unexplained Wealth Order in Britain which targets “people with extreme wealth which seems to have come from nowhere”.
However, Gerard Ryle, head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which led the year-long secret inquiry by a global network of 400 journalists into the Panama Papers cache, said the US and Britain were now among the two worst offshore offenders, “crusading against it internationally but sweeping up the benefits themselves”.
While he welcomed the spotlight being turned back on the issue, Ryle said that it “was a pity” it had somewhat overlooked the patient and dangerous work done by investigative reporters.
Jake Bernstein, who wrote “Secrecy World”, an account of the ICIJ investigation on which the film is based, said America is now “one of the biggest tax havens in the world, and there is a lot of vested interests in keeping the system exactly how it is.
“Delaware is a factory for anonymous shell companies, and making a billion dollars a year from that business. That is something they fight zealously to protect. Transnational gangs and all kinds of malefactors are using Delaware companies around the world to do terrible things.”
A holiday tragedy sends Oscar winner Meryl Streep on a puzzling probe of ambiguous financial dealings in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Laundromat”, a drama based on the massive leak of offshore financial data known as the Panama Papers. With a cast also including Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas and Sharon Stone, the Netflix film, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, seeks to explain the debacle via lessons from characters’ personal stories.
The so-called Panama Papers, consisting of millions of leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in April 2016, provoked a global scandal ater revealing how the rich and powerful used offshore corporations to evade taxes.
Speaking directly to viewers, Oldman and Banderas portray lawyers Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca who try to give their side of the story.
In a similar manner to “The Big Short” about the 2007 financial crisis, the two quirkily explain the world of shell companies and offshore accounts to the audience, who are also taken on a journey of illicit dealings as well as corruption via China, the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean.
“We’re living in a moment where the news cycle is racing and we are racing to keep up with current events and this is an entertaining, flash, funny way of telling a very, very dark black hearted joke, a joke that’s being played on all of us,” Streep told a news conference.
“It’s a crime not without victims and the victims many of them are journalists,” she added, citing Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered while investigating corruption.
“The Laundromat” is one of two Netflix films vying for the festival’s top Golden Lion prize, which the streaming giant won last year for “Roma”.
Oscar winner Soderbergh, known for “Traffic”, “Erin Brokovich” and “Magic Mike”, said he took inspiration from “Dr. Strangelove” as he and writer Scot Z. Burns looked how to present “a complex subject in a way that would be memorable”.
“We decided that a dark comedy had the best possible chance of remaining in the minds of the viewers and also gave us the opportunity to use the complexity of these kind of financial activities almost as a joke, almost as the setup for a punchline,” he said.
“It’s a very troubling time but speaking about it is the beginning, people have been speaking about it for quite a while but on occasion a piece of entertainment can be a conversation starter and get people wondering day to day ‘in my everyday life how am I participating in this’.”