The Laundromat (2019) - Movie Review

It’s Steven Soderbergh time again! Yep, not content with gracing NetFlix with merely a single feature this year, he’s made another one already. Soderbergh’s workhorse work ethic is one in the growing list of reasons why I bloody love this man’s work, as this isn’t even the first time he’s pulled a double-feature like this. In 2012, he released both the stripping economic dramedy Magic Mike and the action thriller Haywire. In 2013, he made the medical thriller Side Effects and the Liberace biopic Behind The Candelabra, which were supposed to be his last films before retiring but… yeah, like a man with this much creative drive has it in him to just step away from a medium he clearly adores.

And with his latest, Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns are on a more vividly political bent, looking at the infamous Panama Papers incident, where a Panamanian law firm was found to be behind a slew of off-shore financial entities that, among other things, fleeced middle-class Americans for their insurance premiums. Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, the two head honchos of said law firm, form the wraparound narration for this collection of tales of the despondent, portrayed by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas respectively. Mossack and Fonseca themselves tried to block this film from release, but unsurprisingly for a platform that makes bank on stand-up comedians wanting safe spaces to rail against safe spaces, Netflix weren’t having any of it.

It operates in a similar fashion to The Big Short in how it combines fourth-wall breaking and comedy to break through economic jargon for the sake of the layman’s understanding. However, whereas that film did so to highlight how the intentional confusion of that jargon is meant to keep their reality under wraps, this ends up wielding to far more depressing ends. Whether it’s Meryl Streep’s widower who gets repeatedly screwed over by Big Finance, or Jessica Allain’s Simone being bribed with a shell company to overlook her father’s infidelity, or Rosalind Chao’s Gu Kailai and her own response to extortion, the film makes it painfully clear just who is getting the short end of the stick amidst all the tax haven crap.

I struggle to say this is as effective as humourous satire, though, as while the comedy in certain scenes definitely rings through, the story itself is all too dour to really gel with it. Soderbergh and Burns deliberately set out to make a comedy here, with the understanding that getting the audience laughing is a good setup for hard facts to follow, again much like The Big Short. And the facts presented are indeed hard-hitting, but also able to swallow whatever comedic potential exists here in a single mouthful.

A recurring leitmotif in the film is referencing Matthew 5:5, the verse about how the meek will inherit the Earth. Through its depictions of how the hard-done-by and struggling are treated in the larger scheme of things (emphasis on ‘scheme’), it is quite blunt about how the meek are not only not going to be doing any such thing, they are the ones who will get fucked over the most. Such is the way with capitalism of this nature, a subject that Soderbergh has not been shy about in the past.

It’s part of the reason why High Flying Bird works as well as it does as, whether taken literally as sports industry expose or figuratively as a larger statement about the Hollywood system, it showed how the haves lord over the have-nots. Same with Logan Lucky, same with Magic Mike, same with his executive production credit on Citizenfour, even his role as second unit director on the first Hunger Games movie.

It’s a topic he is quite passionate about, and even when the comedy doesn’t stick as well as it should, that passion still results in lengthy engagement. A lot of that is due to Streep being fantastic as always, as the widower, a part of Mossack/Fonseca’s inner circle, and even as herself in the particularly charged epilogue. But like the rest of Soderbergh’s filmography, it’s his tightly-constructed film craft, his framing, and his ability to wield cinema’s voyeuristic qualities to revelatory effect, that makes this another fine and possibly crucial addition to his cinematic canon.