Remember when Steven Soderbergh retired from moviemaking? There was a brief moment when the 56-year-old writer-director declared he was done trying to jam his square-peg projects into a one-size-fits-all landscape. The guy who helped kickstart the Sundance Revolution, who reinvented himself via a meta-masterpiece (were talking about Schizopolis and yes, were willing to die on this hill) and reinvigorated George Clooneys career, whos made movies starring Julia Roberts and a KFC employee from West Virginia (respectively), and made us take Channing Tatum seriously he was happy to go paint. Maybe hed give us a premium-cable TV show ever so often.
Luckily for us, his self-proclaimed removal from the game was short-lived. Once Soderbergh decided he wasnt done with this creaky old thing we call cinema, the man came back hard: a celebrity-filled caper goof (Logan Lucky), a sly and socially conscious genre exercise (Unsane), a free-form anti-capitalism screed (High Flying Bird). And while you wouldnt necessarily call The Laundromat a natural culmination or a connective hub, it feels like all three of these post-hiatus works were partial dry runs for what he wanted to try here. A roundabout look at the Panama Papers scandal based loosely on Jake Bernsteins book Secrecy World (and, per a title card, actual secrets), Soderberghs latest gathers a handful of famous faces to chart how clandestine financial networks contributed to a system of rot. Its ambitious, sometimes to a fault. Its all over the map, literally and figuratively. Its a properly outraged movie for these outrageous times.
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Our tour guides for Soderberghs divine comedy are Ramn Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) and Jrgen Mossack (Gary Oldman, rocking a Herzog-level German accent), the lawyers who ran the Panamanian firm identified as Culprit No. 1 in the leaked documents. A direct-address double act in bespoke suits, the two men walk the audience through the history of money and corporate malfeasance, from cavemen times to the golden age of offshore accounts. Slogans like credit is the future tense of the language of money are purred in between smirks on the beach and sipped cocktails in a nightclub. Or rather, on whats blatantly presented as a nightclub set artifice is a key part of the director and his screenwriter Scott Z. Burns agit-pomo attack. Like the phony LLCs set up to take advantage of tax loopholes, the sequences underline the importance of facades over facts. Consider these luxurious lectures an early clue that, in terms of exposes, All the Presidents Men this aint. (Should you crave a more straightforward investigative procedural, the Burns-directed/Soderbergh-produced The Report, about the cover-up of the CIAs interrogation program, hits theaters in November.)
As for the audience surrogate, however, that responsibility falls on Ellen Martin. An elderly woman who becomes involved in a horrible tourist-boat tragedy, shes trying to collect on a settlement so she can start her life over. Except the folks running the boat company cant get their insurance claim paid out, thanks to a number of elaborate switch-ups and policy snafus. Martin starts snooping around, trying to figure out whos responsible for giving her the shaft. Soon, she becomes the human face of every decent citizen whos been screwed over by a system dedicated to benefiting billionaires. And given that this dogged muckraker is played by Meryl Streep, you anticipate some seriously cutting line readings are just around the corner. (Spoiler: They are.) The characters frumpiness hides a steel backbone and a pitbulls unwillingness to let things go. Streep could play this kind of crusader in her sleep, yet she uses the performance as a ballast to the theatricality, the Big Short-style flourishes (there will be chapter titles) and David Holmes ring-a-ding score. The heroine is a fictional creation. But the righteous anger the Oscar-winner invests in her is real.
Her windmill-tilting is the closest thing to a through line that The Laundromat gives you. The rest of the film keeps driving down narrative side streets, including a West Indian insurance broker (Jeffrey Wright) with a big secret, a SoCal mogul (Nonso Anozie) who risks being blackmailed by his daughter (Jessica Allain) over infidelities and a European businessman (Matthias Schoenaerts) trying to strike a deal with Chinese bureaucrats wife (Rosalind Chao). Sharon Stone shows up as a real estate agent; two SNL veterans drop by for cameos as Doomed Gringo #1 and Doomed Gringo #2. At one point, Soderbergh drops a huge self-own about his own dealings with shell companies. The whole thing occasionally threatens into devolve a spot-the-star game of musical genre chairs, where you find yourself in the middle of farce until the music stops, and then an espionage thriller starts up.
If you think the movie sounds a little scattershot, youd be right. Not all of it works; some of its detours turn into dead ends, and god bless the actors from trying to make their data-dump dialogue sound a little less dogmatic. But the cumulative effect of what the filmmakers are up to the fact that theyre not diving into the what of the Panama Papers per se, but why such underground financial networks exist in the first place and how theyre sustained is damning enough to knock you over. You can feel the bile rising as it maps every passed buck and 1-percenter giving another a pat on the back. Then, in one climactic tracking shot, everything boils over. The various sets are torn down or disassembled. A mysterious, lumpen character weve been following turns into a mouthpiece. The riot act is read. And The Laundromat ends on a pre-credits image that feels destined to become a meme. Everyones hands are dirty, it tells us. Maybe its time hold folks accountable and clean up our act.
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