The Laundromat is Stephen Soderbergh’s latest film, covering the run up to the Panama Papers scandal – supposedly through the eyes of Meryl Streep’s character. But the all-star cast is criminally misused, losing the heart of its story line in what turns out to feel more like a political lecture than the story of a poor widow.
The Laundromat, which stars Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman, is clearly taking queues from recent political scandal films from Adam McKay.
The film follows one central story leading up to the Panama Papers scandal, which revealed more than 214,000 offshore entities where many companies were used for illegal purposes such as tax evasion and fraud, though many were technically legal entities.
Soderbergh attempts to show the scandal of this through the eyes of one person, Meryl Streep’s Ellen Martin, who is supposed to be the narrative heart of the film.
Ellen’s dream holiday with her husband, Joe, is ruined when an accident on a sailing boat goes catastrophically wrong, leaving her widowed and penniless.
While Ellen tries to recover insurance money for the accident, she quickly goes down a rabbit hole where she uncovers shady dealings and shell companies all run through one Panama City law firm, run by Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas.)
Through a series of vignettes, the audience is shown how small her issue really is in the swathe of dodgy dealings and indiscretions of shell company holders, some of which are seen to be cheating on their wives, killing their contacts and laundering money all over the place.
Some of the more intricate details of the tax dealings going on is thanks to Mossack and Fonseca themselves, who show up like Las Vegas dealers every so often to talk about money, economics and how they were able to orchestrate some scandalous deals.
Sadly, amongst these vignettes, the story of Streep’s sad, widowed woman is completely lost, and the whole film loses its heart in a very disappointing way.
Oldman’s hammy German accent mixed with Banderas doing his very best Zorro is not enough to save the vignette moments from being awkward and misplaced, leaving the audience missing Meryl Streep as a screen presence.
However, when Streep does finally return, the audience can see this whole film for what it truly is – an uncomfortable lecture about politics.
As Streep removes her various disguises to become completely herself, sitting in front of a green screen, she gives her best Statue of Liberty to remind the audience just how bad legal tax avoidance really is.
As if people don’t already know that.
While The Laundromat has moments of levity, and some of the vignettes do catch your attention fairly well (a sequence featuring Nonso Anozie as a Nigerian businessman bribing his daughter from revealing his many indiscretions to his wife is particularly worth waiting for) the majority of the run time is spent wishing the emotional heart of the film would return.
Had The Laundromat turned to a real “stick it to the man” court room drama, however unbelievable that would have been in the context of what actually happened, the audience would have, at the very least, left feeling as though they hadn’t been shouted at by the liberal elite for 95 minutes.
Sadly, fans were left feeling very much told off, with no discernible narrative to soothe their embarrassment.
At least those with a Netflix subscription do not have to spend cinema ticket money on this film, as it will be out to watch at home on the small screen, which is perfectly adequate for this film.
The Laundromat is released on Netflix on October 18