“The Laundromat” is a Lesser Success by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh emerged from a short-lived “retirement” with the trio Logan Lucky, Unsane, and High Flying Bird — a one-two-three of upward leaps for an already formidable filmmaker. That his next movie, The Laundromat (distributed by Netflix), is a lesser work will not seriously blight his career. Nor is it as bad as many reviewers would have you think. (High Flying Bird and Logan Lucky are also available to stream, as well as his earlier success Side Effects.)

What works is the movie’s core, the main plot and the host of surrounding subplots. What I don’t enjoy is what reviewers have zeroed in on — the unnecessary asides by Gary Oldman and Antonia Banderas, addressing the camera directly with explanations of the financial schemes they employ, à la The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short. The many strands of the story are like the web of real-life people implicated in the Panama Papers scandal, one of the largest data leaks in history and the true story on which the movie is based. Well, it’s the factual event on which the movie is based. I’m not sure how many of the plot elements are from actual real-life stories; obviously Oldman and Banderas’s characters, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, are the real-life partners of the law firm Mossack-Fonseca whose data was leaked. But I haven’t checked up on whether anything else in the movie is based on anything real, and it doesn’t matter either to the movie or to its real-life implications.

The Mossack-Fonseca data leak exposed a colossal worldwide sunburst diagram of businessmen, politicians, celebrities, investment holdings, organised criminals, corrupt officials, wayward family men, financial scams, multinational corporations, and anyone else who happened to hold a little more money than they wanted others to know about. Remember some of the high-profile names named when the Papers were released: the brother-in-law of China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping, the son of Margaret Thatcher, the son of Kofi Annan, members of the Spanish royal family, and the nephew of President Zuma, to name only a very few out of hundreds.

The pleasure of watching the movie is provided by the sure, professional, skillful hand of Soderbergh and his crew, as well as his sense of fun and playfulness in connecting a few disparate dots in a serious, ongoing global scandal. The point emphasised in The Laundromat is that the practices facilitated by Mossack-Fonseca for its clients are not illegal per se, but they enable many illegal practices, most commonly tax evasion and money laundering. The tragedy of the story — the movie’s final despairing, frustrated gasp, uttered by its star, Meryl Streep — is that bringing those involved to account depended on an anonymous individual who leaked information, not on the people and practices that run our financial and our justice systems. As they currently exist, the systems are run by people who benefit from precisely this kind of clandestine behaviour.

The final few minutes move from a scene in the movie to an empty soundstage, a blunt lifting back of the Hollywood Wizard’s curtain. Streep, while delivering her monologue, removes the trappings of her movie costume and wig, to address the camera about the real-life issue of a corrupt and odious financial system, as if leaving her character behind and speaking as herself. But the problem here is the problem of Meryl Streep’s “self”: not her actual self, but per public persona, which is just as carefully controlled and calibrated as any of her movie performances, and which often strikes me as unnatural and strained, particularly when delivering a message of apparent importance. I’m not accusing Streep of disingenuousness; I don’t doubt that she believes in what she preaches, but she always crafts a deliberate performance in which to give it, with meticulous mannerisms and considered inflections to give it a veneer of naturalism. It’s the exact same problem I have with her movie performances (including her performance in this movie), despite my admiration for her immense dedication, craft, and obvious empathy. One day, we may get to finally see that true, inner self. And it won’t be like the lifting of a curtain; it’ll be the terrifying destruction of the Temple.