Mark Reviews Movies: THE LAUNDROMAT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 3, 2019

An ambitious but unfocused dissection of offshore-business shenanigans, The Laundromat wants to be sprawling but intimate. It wants to be cheeky but severe. It wants to present its evidence evenhandedly, but it also wants to rail and shout and, in its final scene, present an actual, real-life manifesto—with a few things the filmmakers have added to make this four-year-old story more relevant—as the final statement of the movie's purpose.

The point is that this is messy, and it almost seems intentionally so. After all, Scott Z. Burns' screenplay (based on Jake Bernstein's book Secrecy World) focuses on shady business and financial practices, which are already confounding enough before people actively try to confound them further.

Specifically, it's about those revealed in the Panama Papers, a massive document dump that showed how the wealthy, politicians, and government officials from around the world hid fortunes in countries with almost non-existent tax laws or other legal benefits. A lot of this was technically legal.

Some of it wasn't. The perception of a politician or public official trying to hide income as a means of avoiding the payment of taxes, though, certainly didn't sit well with many. At least a half a dozen left office after their names came to light. As for prosecutions, this was, as stated earlier, a sizeable leak of information, so the dissemination of the leak is taking some considerable time. The prosecutions are slowly rolling out around the world, though.

The filmmakers, although mostly detailing a Panama City firm that has since shut down (because the attention was entirely bad for a group that depended on secrecy), also want us to think about more local, more seemingly appropriate tax havens—such as, you know, states within the United States that have eliminated certain taxes as a benefit for corporations and the wealthy at the detriment of everybody else. Such practices within the United States are so normal now that even director Steven Soderbergh and Burns, via a character on screen, admit to engaging in them.

Anyway, the leak was notable news at the time, in 2015, but coverage and updates have seemingly fizzled out in the following years. Burns and Soderbergh's movie might get people interested in it again or get the conversation to resume. Such renewed interest and conversation, though, might not be for the reason the filmmakers hoped.

Basically, the new interest might come from those who are simply trying to understand some of things presented in this movie, because the movie itself certainly doesn't put much effort into giving the appropriate background or explanation. Burns' screenplay, which is almost episodic in its structure, throws us into the lion's den, with a pair of seemingly omniscient narrators, played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, explaining the ins and outs of money.

The actors are actually playing essential characters within the story—namely Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, who ran that Panama firm—although that information comes much later. By that point, we're well into the weeds of trying to understand what they're saying, because the filmmakers haven't framed this narrative in a way for basic comprehension.

The semblance of a primary plot involves Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), whose husband and 20 other people are killed when a tour boat capsizes. She begins looking for answers, especially surrounding the tour company's apparent lack of insurance, despite the owner paying for it (Many of these and other unspecified characters are played by a series of recognizable actors—such as James Cromwell, David Schwimmer, Sharon Stone, and Jeffrey Wright—although their brief appearances say more about Soderbergh's clout than anything else).

That story, which includes some shadowy rich people in Las Vegas and a trip to one of those tax havens, is solid, both on its own and especially as a way to gradually bring us into this world, while still establishing a human story to ground the impersonal complexity of unethical/illegal financial practices. Ellen, though, only returns sporadically in between other episodes, somewhat connected by the widow or the boat company's seemingly fake insurance holder.

At a certain point, though, Ellen's story is unceremoniously dropped to follow Mossack and Fonesca, as they learn that the owner of one of their thousands of companies is a notorious drug dealer and try to argue that not all of their clients are criminals. There's a lengthy episode featuring Nonso Anozie as such an "innocent"—a wealthy man who's having an affair with his daughter's roommate and tries to bribe her to stay silent. Through it all, the men from Panama explain their secrets to business, in lengthy, smiling monologues that only compound how little sense Burns has made of this convoluted issue.

Through it all, we grasp that there's a problem, and we definitely comprehend that the filmmakers are angry about it (although that jokey confession of taking advantage of tax avoidance—not, vitally, evasion—makes us wonder just how sincere they actually are). Narratively and tonally, though, The Laundromat is a jumble that only makes this confusing issue even more difficult to comprehend.

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