Netflix. Comedy-Drama. 95 minutes.
Steven Soderbergh has directed films about whistleblowing (Eric Brockovich) and he’s directed films with an arch sense of humor (the Oceans series and The Informant!). With The Laundromat, a too-broad and unfocused attempt to thumb his nose at the tax-cheating fat cats exposed in the Panama Papers, the Oscar winner (Traffic) proves unable to combine the two into one outrageous, breezy, crazy-making, cathartic cry for justice from the land of the 99%. Here Soderbergh aims to whip us into a righteous frenzy by putting a sardonic spin on the enormous document dump in 2015 (from a still-unknown whistleblower BTW) that revealed how the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca set up thousands of shell companies for rich individuals and corporations worldwide to help them avoid paying income taxes. In telling this story, Soderbergh combines the go-girl feminist crusader drama Erin Brockovich with the “absurd injustice requires absurdist storytelling” angle of The Big Short. But the resulting desultory mess is the first Soderbergh film in memory, even going back those he cranked out during his wilderness years, before Out of Sight resurrected his career, where the whole enterprise feels poorly conceived and under baked.
Unlike 2015’s The Big Short, a fast-moving, scathing, forensic-level damnation that couldn’t contain its sense of outrage, The Laundromat plays like Mossack Fonseca was the subject of a particularly harsh Dean Martin roast except guards were at the door waiting for Don Rickles to finish his routine before slapping the cuffs on Jurgen Mossack and partner-in-crime Ramon Fonseca.
Here Mossack and Fonseca narrate their own story in a series of insouciant and stylized, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”, direct-to-camera duologues. Played by, respectively, Gary Oldman (effecting an accent that sounds so much like Werner Herzog, Soderbergh should have just cast Werner Herzog) and Antonio Bandaras, Often with cocktail in hand, Mossack and Fonseca take us through the reason money was invented, why credit became necessary and what shell companies do, right up to their self-immolating contention that they had no idea they were doing anything illegal.
Deviating from the source material, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein’s Panama Papers investigation, “Secrecy World,” screenwriter Scott Z. Burns wisely brings it down to Ma and Pa level by concentrating on the story of little ol’ Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep). A doting grandmother, Ellen’s Lake George vacation turns to tragedy when their tour boat capsizes and her husband (James Cromwell) drowns. Continually stonewalled in her attempt to collect her insurance settlement, the plucky Ellen soon hops a plane to the Caribbean to face down the company within a company within a company presumably responsible for cutting her a check. Needless to say, no check is coming because her insurance company doesn’t really exist. The same frustration awaits the tour boat captain (Robert Patrick) and his disbelieving son (David Schwimmer), who just wanted to save a few bucks on his insurance.
Divvying up the action into chapters gives Soderbergh the opportunity to spotlight a different corner of Mossack Fonseca’s empire with a different set of characters. Best is the story of an insanely wealthy African businessman (Nonso Anozie) living in Beverly Hills who teaches his daughter, Simone (Jessica Allain) a lesson in high-stakes negotiations after he’s caught cheating on his wife with Simone’s best friend. The least effective involves the murder of a British businessman (Matthias Schoenaerts) by the wife (Rosalind Chao) of a former Communist party bigwig. While looping in government officials from far-away countries demonstrates the problem’s reach, it’s not made clear-enough how this circles back to Mossack Fonseca draining the film of energy it never quite gets back.
Soderbergh cannot maintain a sufficient level or an effective balance of comedy, drama or outrage leaving us with a low-boil tragi-comedy that doesn’t have the laser-sharpened fury to enflame our sense of outrage at those who manipulate the mysterious and complicated levers of worldwide financial machinery to further their wealth. Part of this is because Soderbergh is not the right director for this material. As one of the industry’s biggest brains, someone whose thoughts on the business and creative sides of filmmaking are some of the most well-considered and provocative, Soderbergh is using his intellect to poke the powers that be in the eye. He’s not a naturally empathetic storyteller and yet he’s telling a story that should be channeling its rage exclusively through characters we empathize with in a “there but for the grace of God go I” manner. With a distancing attitude of high-minded impertinence and an absurdist humor that circles the target but can’t quite hit it, The Laundromat doesn’t feel irreverent. It feels irrelevant.