Steven Soderbergh, we all know, can do anything. So it’s interesting that over a storied career that includes Palme d’Or-winning microbudget indies, semi-experimental actioners, ambitious literary adaptations, man-against-the-machine biopics, and unshowy formalist documentaries, he should have alighted so often on the heist movie. His three ‘Oceans‘ films, “Out of Sight,” and most recently “Logan Lucky” all sit squarely in that area, and—though it might seem counterintuitive to begin with—they also perfectly pave the way for the energetic filmmaking of his latest jaunty, globetrotting romp “The Laundromat.” After all, the film is a grab-bag sample of loosely connected stories that came to light during the 2015 leak of the so-called Panama Papers. And how better to describe the trail of insurance malfeasance, financial skullduggery, corporate fraud and political corruption they uncovered than as a heist — one that operates on a global scale, with you, me, and our next-door neighbors as its clueless marks.
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Written by Scott Z. Burns (who also wrote Soderbergh’s similarly themed, similarly antic “The Informant!“), the screenplay’s first witty flourish is to use the villains of the piece, Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) as our winking, self-justifying, martini-sipping guides. Lawyers and literal partners in crime, Jürgen and Ramón head up Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based legal firm through which the very wealthy funnel their money into endless shell companies and offshore accounts. As Oldman’s Mossack explains in his haphazardly unplaceable accent, this is how they take advantage of legal loopholes and tax avoidance schemes so that—at worst—the trail for any bloodhound following the money from their French mansions and million-dollar Las Vegas condos would dead-end out at a postbox in Nevis or Cyprus or Gibraltar.
At the other, rawer end of the deal, there are the meek, still awaiting their earthly inheritance. They are exemplified here by Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), a sunny retiree whose husband (James Cromwell) is killed on the eve of their 40th anniversary when their pleasure boat capsizes. The boat’s captain (Robert Patrick) and his son (David Schwimmer) discover the insurance they were paying is worthless, duped out of them by a fraudulent bigamist called Boncamper (Jeffrey Wright). Coincidentally (or not, because all these threads lead back to Mossack & Fonseca as the grinning, shrugging, immaculately tailored spiders in the middle of this web), Boncamper is also implicated in the laundering of some Russian money that is used to outbid Ellen on the condo she has her widow’s heart set on.
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From there, we skip from tax shelter to tax shelter, with each perfectly cast, engaging vignette illustrating another of Mossack Fonseca’s scams. There’s the African businessman (a delicious turn from Nonso Anozie) whose financial house of cards topples when his spoiled daughter discovers his affair with her college roommate; the doomed Englishman (Matthias Schoenaerts) who overplays his hand with a calculating Chinese politician’s wife (Rosalind Chao); and petty intermediaries like Mia Beltran (Brenda Zamora), a low-level, bus-riding, cubicle-bound employee of Mossack Fonseca who does the dirty business of signing reams of documents, unaware that a thousand miles away someone thinks she is hugely important and wealthy because she’s technically the director of 25,000 different companies.
“The Laundromat” is essentially a caper film, and when following the money gets too intricate, Ramón and Jürgen show up again to guide us. Throuhgout the film, they step into and out of stage sets and costumes with a Brechtian disregard for the fourth wall, like tuxedo-ed Virgils giving us a tour of the outer circles of wealth-management hell. The tone is lighthearted, even when people are dying in hotel rooms, corneas are being graphically harvested and contract law being laboriously explained. But the wit and ease are deceptive, concealing almost frighteningly impeccable filmmaking. We’ll say it again: Soderbergh has almost no peer in terms of simply knowing where to put the camera for maximum visual variety. And if ever the energy threatens to lag, there’s David Holmes‘ heel-toe, quick-change score with its rubbery basslines and scurrying percussion. Bouncy as a trampoline, it launches us easily across oceans and continents, smoothing out the rougher transitions and never letting the pace flag.
The jolly cynicism in the recreation of a real-life story of the 0.1% exploiting the 99.9%; the fourth walls that crumble left and right; the colorful use of analogies about cows and bananas to explain the more difficult to grasp concepts; even the fairly obvious prosthetics; all this means comparisons to Adam McKay‘s “The Big Short” and “Vice” are unavoidable. But though “The Laundromat” is similarly breezy, unsubtle, and disposable—it is not, we’d wager, one of the Soderbergh films that will best stand the test of time—it is still a better movie. That’s in part because this incredible cast in their sunny locations just seems to be having the best time, and that’s infectious no matter what the subject matter.
But it’s also because Soderbergh and Burns know just how far to push the self-conscious dumbing-down (we all remember Margot Robbie in the bathtub, but do we recall the financial terms she was trying to explain to us?) and because their maximalist, cameo-stuffed approach is not just showing off, but illustrative of the film’s real moral. If these forces and systems seem impersonal and unfightable, behind every one of them, as Ramon says, there are “just people.” If we stay vigilant and blow all the whistles we can find, these people can be brought, however briefly, to something resembling justice. In the laundromat that is the international wealth-management Ponzi scheme, the money comes out sparkling — crisp and clean and history-less, as though it had been printed only yesterday. But people come out dirtier than when they went in, and dirty people leave a trail. [B]
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