The Laundromat is yet another Hollywood film that tries to explain complex financial and political topics in light-hearted – and arguably patronising – ways, reports Dan Slevin.
Gary Oldman (Mossack) and Antonio Banderas (Fonseca) in Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat. Photo: Netflix
According to Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca are not high-powered international lawyers Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca but are instead campy double-act Mossack & Fonseca, a Las Vegas-style glamour couple with a taste for the high life and the means to maintain it. The way they are portrayed by Gary Oldman (Mossack) and Antonio Banderas (Fonseca), in their sequined tuxedos, reminded me of the famous illusionists Siegfried & Roy. When we finally see how they live – not actually together as it turns out – I half expected there to be white lions in their own garden.
In a way, Mossack & Fonseca were illusionists. They certainly made plenty of money disappear. But it is not their representation as a larger-than-life Greek chorus, commenting on and explaining the shenanigans, that has prompted Mossack and Fonseca to try and injunct Netflix from screening this film, it is the fact that they are still under intense scrutiny from global law enforcement – let’s call them Interplod – and have concerns that a film in which they are portrayed by globally admired movie actors might affect their legal situation.
The explosive whistleblowing of the Panama Papers in 2016 had already put them under the spotlight and that is the subject of Soderbergh’s amusing romp through tax avoidance, oligarchs, corruption and tropical bolt-holes. Our way in is via Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), recently widowed as a result of a tragic pleasure boat accident. When she – and in fact everyone involved – discovers that the chain of insurers and reinsurers ends up with a bankrupt shell company in the Cayman Islands (edit: a reader reminds me that the insurance company was actually in St Kitts and Nevis), she decides to investigate.
Meryl Streep sleuthing in The Laundromat. Photo: Netflix
She isn’t a real person, of course. She is a cypher, helping open up the story so that other cyphers might represent the kind of people doing the kind of shitty business that Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm, enabled. The Panama Papers involved more than 11 and a half million documents. There’s no way we could boil that down to a story without fictionalising it – all well and good.
Where we come a little unstuck is when we go off on tangents to other representatives of the Mossack Fonseca clientele: Nonzo Anosie’s philandering South African tycoon buying the silence of his family with worthless shares while keeping his real wealth hidden behind Mossack Fonseca offshore trusts and Rosalind Chao’s corrupt Chinese property developer trying to keep her South of France house secret from the central committee with the help of greedy Matthias Schoenaerts.
Photo: Netflix
It isn’t that these interludes aren’t instructive so much as that they are distracting. The Laundromat is episodic which isn’t automatically disqualifying but the threads don’t knit together satisfyingly enough to make something complete.
You will learn a bit about the world of the Panama Papers, true, and there are amusing moments, but this might be a topic better served by a good book.
The Laundromat is streaming on Netflix now. According to their classification system it is rated 16+.
