The party’s over (or is it just starting?)
By: Jorge Mourinha
Tags: Film Criticism, Movies, Steven Soderbergh, Netflix Originals

The party’s over (or is it just starting?)

THE LAUNDROMAT is not his finest, but it is recognizable from a distance as a “Steven Soderbergh Joint”

THE LAUNDROMAT, US 2019, 96 min. Starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas. Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the book Secrecy World by Jake Bernstein. Streaming on Netflix.

Is it fair to say that Steven Soderbergh got late to the party for once? The Big Short had already done the popular-economics shtick of making the ins and outs of obscure financial products and their role in the Great Recession of 2008 understandable to the average joe; hence, the breezy, deadpan humor of The Laundromat seems to be a bit fusty by now.

But we’d probably be better off by connecting this adaptation of Jake Bernstein’s non-fiction book Secrecy World to an earlier, and also misunderstood, Sodebergh twister, The Informer!, whose fourth-wall-breaking outlandishness and general snarky stranger-than-fiction tone it recaptures. The Laundromat, though, is a much more serious film underneath it all — a sickly-smile deep dive into the scandal of the Panama Papers, and a representation of how the financial system is rigged, that employs a lot of irony to make its point. Nothing is ever what it seems with Soderbergh, which could be the whole modus operandi of his career, seeing as so much of his work is about transactional economics; it’s just that The Laundromat takes it further into rabbit dens of layer upon layer of obfuscation.

Adapting Bernstein’s book as an interconnected series of jet-setting vignettes, Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Burns, a frequent collaborator who also wrote The Informer!, play with expectations (both narrative and the viewer’s) in structuring the tale. It’s all a matter of sleight of hand, passing the baton in often audacious ways. At one point, the odd-couple team of MCs that greet us throughout the film, formed by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas as real-life offshore specialist lawyers Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, appear in a supermarket to hand off the film to Meryl Streep as Ellen Martin. Ellen is a fictional viewer-surrogate who just lost her husband (James Cromwell) in a freak cruise accident, and finds she’s losing out on the insurance settlement due to all the elaborate shell games played by investment companies that make millions while stiffing regular joes from their hard-earned cash.

Gary Oldman as Jürgen Mossack and Antonio Banderas as Ramón Fonseca. Credit: Claudette Barius/Netflix

Acting as always as his own DP and editor, Soderbergh shoots the entire merry-go-round of situations as so many variations on stereotypical film genres, from comedy to actioner, but always orbiting around the corporate malfeasance problem picture. One espionage interlude in China even sees the format extend to widescreen before reverting to standard 1.85:1 ratio at the end. This is yet another of Soderbergh’s constant semiotic games that is of greater interest to film students and writers than to audiences, especially because it is not as notable on the TV screen where The Laundromat’s status as a Netflix original means it’ll be more widely seen.

To be sure, the director’s narrative and filmic nous is absolutely independent of the medium he’s working on. Lest we forget, Behind the Candelabra was made at HBO after no major Hollywood studio took a chance on it; and Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience were part of an unfinished series of low-budget day-and-date VOD experiences; while the outrageously underrated Unsane was shot on an iPhone. The Laundromat has enough of Soderbergh’s sparkling formal playfulness to make sure that even director completists will find something interesting to sink their teeth into here. But it’s also true it isn’t grade-A Soderbergh: the relay-race, episodic structure is marred by an under-utilized, all-star cast (Sharon Stone, Jeffrey Wright, Matthias Schoenaerts, Will Forte, David Schwimmer…) that drops by for brief cameos and distracts you from the plot.

Meryl Streep as Ellen Martin. Credit: Claudette Barius/Netflix

More surprisingly, Soderbergh can’t seem to maintain a consistent tone throughout, with the fun and games coming on either too pointed or too detached, too cynical or too blithely innocent. Maybe that was his point all along: you can’t have just one tone on a story ripped from the headlines like this one, in a time where there are as many truths as eyes of the beholder. But it does diminish the end result of The Laundromat, both too earnest and too manic to succeed on its own terms, swaying all over the place like a pendulum with constant momentum but no easy point to get in and/or out of.