REVIEWS
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 73
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
The leak of the so-called Panama Papers in 2015
brought more than 11 million documents
into public view and revealed the client list of
Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. This
included wealthy politicians and criminal
characters alike, who’d used the firm’s services
to set up offshore shell companies and hide their
money from taxation. Ample material there for
a forensic documentary exposé from the likes
of Alex Gibney. But director-cameraman-editor
Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns
opt for a very different approach, with known
facts and real-life personalities contributing
to an often light-hearted affair, bolstered by
the avowed purpose of taking US lawmakers
to task for their weak record of oversight.
From the outset, there’s a tension between
the portentous subject matter and the delivery,
as middle-aged lounge lizards Gary Oldman
and Antonio Banderas – sporting spangly
monkey suits and, in Oldman’s case, a ve-haf-
vays German accent – walk and talk us through
a lecture on the history of money, from the
earliest barter systems to today’s promissory
credit network. We subsequently learn that
these two are playing Jürgen Mossack and
Ramón Fonseca, founders of the law firm that
fabricated tax-resistant paper companies for the
world’s wealthy on a virtually industrial scale.
Their chummy presenter shtick plays out as
smug and grating, but maybe that’s the point,
as they sleekly try to absolve themselves of any
responsibility for their clients’ criminal activities.
The movie ventures towards something
more relatable when Meryl Streep’s housewife
Ellen Martin discovers the shocking meaning
of ‘shell company’ after her husband drowns
in a tourist boating accident and the insurers
turn out to be a virtual presence operating from
a PO box in the Caribbean. The hinted-at Erin
Brockovich underdog fable never quite kicks in,
however, the rationale for Streep’s (somewhat
overpowering) presence evidently being to
deliver a fierce climactic lecture encouraging the
US authorities to tackle the money-laundering
issue, even if that affects the rich companies
who donate to the country’s political parties.
When Meryl speechifies, we listen, though
by that point the movie’s wayward progress and
flailing attempts at humour have somewhat
hobbled its muckraking potency. As we visit
the working innards of the offshore banking
machine and drop in on vignettes showing how
philandering African businessmen and corrupt
Chinese political higher-ups alike are tangled
in the money-moving network, the overall
effect is breezily unpredictable and tantalisingly
tricky to pin down. In contrast to the year’s other
Burns-Soderbergh collaboration, The Report, a
sinewy and sincere look at US military torture
tactics post-9/11, this is wispy stuff, which could
be read as a ragbag of glittery fragments or a
structurally unconventional bringing-together
of the whole elusive miasma that is the shell-
company arena. While we never quite lose
the suspicion that the sheer slipperiness of the
material may have defeated the filmmakers, both
these interpretations seem simultaneously valid.
True to form, the supposedly post-retirement
Soderbergh works through an array of deft
scene transitions, startling camera angles and
exquisitely framed, garishly appointed interiors,
though the trick of using madcap wit to sharpen
our appreciation of the underlying iniquities on
view doesn’t work nearly as well as it did in his and
Burns’s The Informant! (2009). In addition, the jokey
expository heavy-lifting carried out by smirking
Messrs Oldman and Banderas comes over as a
bit passé in the wake of Adam McKay’s The Big
Short (2015), which deployed sundry celebrity
guests to amusing and enlightening effect in its
subprime-for-dummies explanatory flourishes.
While there are certainly elements here that
disappoint, there’s also a sense of Burns and
Soderbergh applying themselves to a potentially
impossible challenge. How do you take important
but intractable material, have eye-catching fun
with it and still get the salient points across?
Someone else may yet deliver the straight-up doc
version of these events, but credit to Soderbergh
and company for at least trying to educate and
entertain in a project that certainly doesn’t look
out of place on the big screen but is essentially a
Netflix assignment destined for home viewing.
Pitched as a palate-livener for couch-bound
audiences who are looking to engage with the
issues but maybe don’t want to feel they’re back
at school or being made to work too hard, it has
its place. Still, a scattering of proper laughs and
fewer groanworthy asides would have made it a
more amenable viewing experience all round.
Two middle-aged lounge lizards, Jürgen and Ramón,
explain how the idea of money led to the concept
of credit and ultimately the complex web of today’s
financial market. Early 2010s, Lake George, New York
State. Middle-aged Ellen Martin is widowed when
a freak wave causes a tourist boat to capsize. She
later discovers that the boat owners have no cover,
because their insurers turn out to be an elusive
shell company. Ellen follows the trail to Nevis in the
Caribbean, but finds that the holding company’s
address is a PO box. Boncamper, director of myriad
paper companies enabling the wealthy to hide their
money, is subsequently arrested by US authorities.
Jürgen and Ramón are revealed to be the founders of
Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm facilitating
many thousands of such shell operations. They claim no
responsibility for the actions of their clients. Meanwhile,
dramatised vignettes show their connections to
a scheming US-based African businessman and a
blackmailing English financial adviser murdered by
the wife of a leading Chinese politician. In 2015, a huge
data leak from ‘John Doe’ exposes Mossack Fonseca’s
dubious tax-evasion activities and their client list, which
includes international politicians and criminals alike.
Jürgen and Ramón go to jail, while the source of the
leak is revealed to be one of their office workers – Ellen
Martin in disguise. Ellen gives a speech berating the US
government for its lack of action on money laundering.
The Laundromat
USA 2019
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Produced by
Lawrence Grey
Gregory Jacobs
Michael Sugar
Scott Z. Burns
Written by
Scott Z. Burns
Based on the book
Secrecy World by
Jake Bernstein
Director of
Photography
Peter Andrews
[i.e. Steven
Soderbergh]
Editor
Mary Ann Bernard
[i.e. Steven
Soderbergh]
Production Designer
Howard Cummings
Music
David Holmes
Production
Sound Mixer
Dennis Towns
Costume Designer
Ellen Mirojnick
©Netflix US, LLC
Production
Companies
A Grey Matter,
Sugar23/Anonymous
Content, Topics
Studios production
Executive Producers
Michael Polaire
Douglas Urbanski
Ben Everard
Michael Bloom
Adam Pincus
Jake Bernstein
Cast
Meryl Streep
Ellen Martin
Gary Oldman
Jürgen Mossack
Antonio Banderas
Ramón Fonseca
Jeffrey Wright
Malchus Irvin
Boncamper
Melissa Rauch
Melanie
Jeff Michalski
Norm Sidley
Jane Morris
Barb Sidley
Robert Patrick
Captain Paris
David Schwimmer
Matthew Quirk
Cristela Alonzo
Special Agent Kilmer
Larry Clarke
Ellen’s attorney
Will Forte
Chris Parnell
doomed gringos
Nonso Anozie
Charles
Larry Wilmore
Jeff
Jessica Allain
Simone
Nikki Amuka-Bird
Miranda
Matthias
Schoenaerts
Maywood
Rosalind Chao
Gu Kailai
Kunjue Li
Gu’s aide
Ming Lo
Chief Wang Lijun
James Cromwell
Joe Martin
Sharon Stone
Hannah
In Colour
[1.78:1]
Distributor
Netflix
To shell and back: Meryl Streep
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 16
