Panama Papers revisited in Soderbergh’s light drama

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Whistle-blower saga in ‘Laundromat’

Steven Soderbergh’s “The Laundromat” is a fluky contradiction that works. I’m tempted to call it a brain-teaser – not because it’s some sort of clockwork mystery caper that toys with your expectations, but because it’s a true-life journalistic drama about the new world order of offshore financial corruption (which gets shrouded, by design, in the new world disorder of financial gobbledygook), and it’s a movie you’ve got to put on your thinking cap to watch. But then, Soderbergh knows how to make using your head fun.

Made for Netflix, “The Laundromat” flashes by in a brisk and buoyant 90 minutes, but it’s about something that can seem, at times, ludicrously complicated: the scandal of the Panama Papers, which revealed, with a detail that hadn’t been reported in the mainstream media, the staggering network of shell companies, many located on tropical islands, in which the global financial elite conceal their assets to avoid paying taxes, or just to stash the funds, period.

A major news story in 2015, the Panama Papers made tangible what a lot of us already, in essence, knew: that the moneyed elite, the people with power, the one percent – whatever you want to call them – didn’t just have “advantages”. They were playing by an entirely different set of rules, living in another system. A rigged system. A global racket. One that’s been engineered, often through the numbing logistics of financial jargon, to be a smokescreen.

The trouble is, how do you tell that story and get people to feel like they’re watching an actual movie, rather than just, you know, the illustrated version of a 12,000-word Atlantic magazine cover story? Soderbergh has figured out a way. He has designed “The Laundromat” as a light drama that’s also a tongue-in-cheek lecture – a kind of sardonic meta analysis of our corruption as acted out by a handful of its players and pawns.

Based on “Secrecy World”, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein’s book-length expose of the shadow economy, “The Laundromat” doesn’t pretend to make us “care” about the characters we’re watching. But partly for that reason, it’s a more cutting and compelling movie than “The Big Short”. It’s also the first film I’ve seen by a major director that feels like it belongs on Netflix more than it does in a theater. At home, you can rewind it to catch a detail or two you might have missed, and not have to pretend that it’s more than a droll ingenious sketchbook of a movie.

The Panama Papers, a series of documents that revealed the details of more than 200,000 offshore entities, got leaked to journalists by an anonymous source inside the Panamanian law firm of Mossack Fonseca.

The firm’s two founders, the German-born Jurgen Mossack and his Panamanian partner, Ramon Fonseca, are played in the film by Gary Oldman, chewing on a Chermin accent with hambone bonhomie, and Antonio Banderas, who matches him in eager, self-justifying volubility.

Concept

They’re not just the film’s narrators, they’re its deviously enthused hosts, kicking things off with a prelude in which they explain the concept of money from the ground up, starting with the barter system of old, moving onto cash, then credit, then all the wordswe now use to dress up the concept of … money.

These explanations, which the two, clad in glittery suits, deliver with absurd sincerity in a variety of settings, help us absorb the information we need to, but they’re also enacting the film’s theme: that in finance, starting in the late 1970s, the how of things grew so complicated that it started to trump the why of things. Mossack and Fonseca are power brokers, but they’re also cogs: bureaucrats guiding money into the right (fake) coffers. That’s the joke, the tragedy, the scandal.

“The Laundromat” is structured, theoretically, as a whistle-blower saga, designed to show us how the Panama Papers came to light. But the way the story was uncovered almost doesn’t matter; what Soderbergh is interested in is how the world of it all works. He brings a handful of minor and major players to life as characters, all with a tone of deadpan but slightly chortling can-you-believe-this? Reportorial glee.

One by one, we’re drawn, ever so blithely, into their stories. There’s plucky Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), a coarse but sweet Middle American nobody, in a bedraggled gray-blonde mop, who loses her husband (James Cromwell) on a tour-boat accident on Lake George, then learns she’s not going to receive the insurance payout she deserved. The reason? The boat business signed a contract with an on-the-cheap insurance company, which was taken over by another company, and it turns out that none of these companies even … exist. They’re shell companies, abstract entities that do nothing.

In form, “The Laundromat” is “Traffic” lite, and it has a message that’s even more timely and important: The world – our world – is being looted. And here’s how. But this time, Soderbergh works with a let’s-try-it-on prankishness. He divides the movie into lessons with snark titles like “Secret Number One: The Meek Are Screwed”. He has Streep, in disguise, playing a Panamanian office drone whose anonymity turns out to be an in-joke. And Mossack and Fonseca look right into the camera to inform us that shell companies in Delaware (yes, Delaware) are so common that “the director of this film” uses five of them. At the end, though, Soderbergh lets his lead actress take over, turning the film into a grand tour de Streep of “J’accuse!” And why not? Streep and Soderbergh are saying that this issue matters more than their own damn movie. Who are we to disagree? (RTRS)

By Owen Gleiberman

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