Spin cycle
Steven Soderbergh’s preachy ‘Laundromat’ is a waste of talent
NETFLIX needs to add a category for its new original film “The Laundromat.” Right under “Movies you might like” should be “Movies you will loathe.”
Director Steven Soderbergh’s fatal error was choosing to make a film about the Panama Papers, the millions of leaked documents from a Central American law firm that in 2016 revealed the unscrupulous offshore activities of the rich and powerful. Get out the popcorn, kids!
Because most of us don’t have our multimillion-dollar companies incorporated in Nevis, the public never latched onto that news story, just as they won’t to the preachy movie based on it.
Soderbergh’s source material is the book “Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite,” which itself is based on 11.5 million pages of complex legalese. The resulting movie is a dense series of loosely connected, realish parables involving the criminal or immoral behavior that sprung from the disgraced law firm Mossack Fonseca’s creation of millions of shell companies.
While shell companies — businesses without offices or employees — are not themselves illegal, it’s easy to do illegal things with them, such as evade taxes.
In the case of Meryl Streep’s character Ellen, the squeaky-voiced retiree can’t collect an insurance payout after her husband’s death in the real 2005 Lake George, NY, boat sinking because the insurer is a fake connected to Mossack Fonseca. Although Streep leans on that irksome facial tic where her eyes dart from side to side like a cartoon spy, her story is the only worthwhile one.
The other tales in this web of sighs — including a philandering African billionaire, a Chinese company owner and the naive pawns along the way — only provide a messy economics vocab lesson, flatly directed by Soderbergh.
The funniest part of this comedy is that the director thinks it’s a comedy, a la “The Big Short.” Nobody gets laughs, though. Especially not Gary Oldman as Mossack and Antonio Banderas as Fonseca. They sleepily narrate the film wearing tuxes and drinking martinis as they explain concepts such as credit using childish metaphors.
At the end of the film, the sleazy lawyers blame — who else? — the US for its havens, such as Delaware, where tax laws are loose in order to stimulate business. Streep, who pointlessly also plays a Panamanian secretary, then takes off her costume and speaks out of character, PSA-style, railing against the systems that have allowed these injustices to flourish.
That’s when it hits you: You’ve just watched a 96-minute op-ed.