86 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
Antonio Banderas, Meryl Streep, and Gary Oldman in Steven Soderbergh’s film.
THECURRENTCINEMA
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
“The Laundromat” and “Downton Abbey.”
BYANTHONYLANE
ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE RIFKIN
I
f you had to categorize Steven So
derbergh’s new film, “The Laun
dromat,” what would you call it? An
extended skit; a blast of indignation
against the avarice of recent times; a
jigsaw of minimovies, just about fitted
together; a Brechtian Lehrstück, pulling
us into the plot, schooling us in its di
dactic purpose, and reducing the fourth
wall to rubble; or simply a bit of a mess?
One thing is for sure. Soderbergh and
his screenwriter, Scott Burns, cannot be
accused of hiding their central theme.
At the start of the proceedings, a clump
of tumbleweed bowls along desert sands,
followed, somewhat surprisingly, by two
gentlemen in formal evening wear. Each
bears a friendly smile and a cocktail in
his hand. Their names are Ramón (An
tonio Banderas) and Jürgen (Gary Old
man), and they will be our hosts for this
motion picture. Appearing at intervals,
they guide us through “the secret life of
money,” maintaining an aura of genial
condescension. (Plus, in Jürgen’s case, a
German accent so thick that you could
spread it like lard. Do I detect an injoke
on the part of Oldman, who won an
Oscar last year for playing Churchill?)
Only in the latter stages does that aura
disperse, as the hosts are finally, to their
dismay, pulled into the guts of the ac
tion. Money eats everything in sight.
“The Laundromat” is divided into seg
ments, each prefaced with a rueful motto.
First up is “The Meek Are Screwed.”
We meet a retired couple, Ellen Martin
(Meryl Streep) and her husband, Joe
( James Cromwell), as they take a trip
on Lake George, the point being that
their existence, benign and gently paced,
is as far from the swagger of Jürgen and
Ramón as you can get. Yet there is a
connection between these disparate lives.
When calamity strikes, and Ellen’s law
yer files an insurance claim, it is discov
ered that the insurance company has
been sold to a larger outfit, which in
turn is beholden to yet another corpo
rate body, and so forth. In short, Ellen
finds herself at the mercy of shell com
panies, which, like sonnets, are no less
potent for existing only on paper. In
common with millions of other folk,
she is blameless, unwitting, and initially
uncomprehending; yet she is far from
incurious, and thus her sleuthing be
gins. She becomes a shell seeker.
First stop is the West Indies. “Where
in the world is Nevis?” Ellen says, on
learning that one of the shells is registered
there. She flies to the island and goes
looking for someone named Boncamper.
“I don’t know him,” a passing resident
says—a wise precaution, since he is Bon
camper ( Jeffrey Wright), the overseer
of many suspect companies, with fingers
in innumerable pies. He seems to be a
strong family man, and, on home ground,
at least, he is breaking no laws; but is
he a good man? And, if he isn’t, how
did he arrive at his twilit moral state?
Wright is, as usual, such an arresting
presence onscreen that we are left want
ing more of his character; instead, he
comes and goes, setting a piecemeal pat
tern for the entire film.
Other halfsketched figures crowd
the stage. Nonso Anozie plays Charles,
an affable bruiser so corrupt that, when
caught in a transgression, he bribes his
own nearest and dearest to hush them
up; if they grow less near and furiously
nondear, so be it. Then, we have May
wood (Matthias Schoenaerts), who makes
an illomened attempt to put the squeeze
on a Chinese businesswoman (Rosalind
Chao), and a disappointingly brief role
for Sharon Stone, as a Las Vegas real
estate agent. What Soderbergh is aim
ing for here, in other words, is the sort
of group portrait that he delivered in
“Traffic,” as opposed to the solo hero
ics of “Erin Brockovich.” (Both movies,
amazingly, came out in 2000: not a bad
year’s work.) I’d guess that he also took
stock of Adam McKay’s “The Big Short”
(2015), another cautionary tale of finan
cial abuse, which was so anxious not to
bore or to burden us that it kept fooling
around with the narrative—getting Mar
got Robbie, say, to explain subprime mort
gages while lounging in a bubble bath.
Whether the average viewer of “The
Big Short” could, two days after watch
ing it, still tell you about subprimes is
open to debate; I suspect that, for most
of us, the pedagogy got lost in the fooling,
leaving no more than a light froth of
outrage. The same is true of “The Laun
dromat.” Behind the film lie the Panama
Papers—the millions of files, leaked in
2016, that demonstrated how the wealthy
stash their moola offshore and thereby
avoid the plebeian vulgarity of tax. Any
