Venice Film Festival 2019: THE LAUNDROMAT

Steven Soderbergh’s self-imposed retirement five years ago is the gift that keeps on giving. Soderbergh’s exile from the mainstream has hailed the infamously efficient director to now make surprise feature every year and is the second addition to his ongoing Netflix production after last years High Flying Birds.

The Laundromat, based on the book Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by author Jake Bernstein, is a multi-layered story that follows a host of characters after a tragic boat accident. The story unravels from fraudulent insurance into an exposé of offshore shell companies and mega billionaires all in bed with one another.

A Compelling Albeit Tough Viewing

Soderbergh’s films fall into two categories. The first is the more mainstream film that follows a simplistic screenplay with engaging characters in the same vein of Logan Lucky or Magic Mike. The other is a more complex experience that focuses all its attention on one niche subject matter like High Flying Bird or the Che films. Soderbergh’s latest The Laundromat falls into the camp of the latter. A vast expose on the frightening levels of fraud first reported on in the Panama papers in 2016 makes for a compelling, albeit tough viewing.

This tax evasion feature (maybe the first of its kind?) is a little too sporadic with its structure, and the constant injection of exposition is brutally heavy throughout. There is a significant amount of detail and plot to get through and Soderbergh, as well as writer Scott Z. Burns, exercise a meta and fourth wall breaking decision to deliver information directly from the source without an awkward go-between in the screenplay.

It is the performances of Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas as Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca respectively that act as mouthpieces to explain the detail and intricacies of all things money. This fourth wall delivery greatly benefits for a more inviting and substantially engaging feature, and to Burns‘ credit, the material given to the audience is easily digestible, even if it does arrive in significant chunks.

Slick and Stylish

The Laundromat is a slick and stylish exercise that tries to keep the story balanced and on the rails, for the long run it does succeed, but there is just too much plot and too little time in just over ninety minutes to truly dive into this subject matter. By the final act, the material ultimately defeats Soderbergh and the audience with how excessive it all is. By the end the large amount of characters has escalated to the point of explosion and a total lack of intimacy.

There are multiple characters involved in the film’s central themes with notable actors portraying them, such as Sharon Stone, David Schwimmer and Robert Patrick, that have one or two scenes and are then dropped unexpectedly for the film to move on to the next topic. The roles are essentially bloated cameos, and it ultimately cheats the audience and restricts the engagement with the film continually jumping to the next story without any resolution of the previous arc.

The Laundromat: Conclusion

An eight-part mini-series would have perfectly sufficed the material at hand and would have helped explore the more ignored characters. As is, it’s only Meryl Streep’s character that the audience is given the chance to connect with. Soderbergh undoubtedly crafts an incredibly alluring fixture with a hefty and enlightening impactful weight. However, the overindulgence in wanting to explain and highlight as much material as possible ultimately drowns this drama in the excessive narrative with its limited running time.

Will you be watching the latest Soderbergh on Netflix or would you prefer it on a cinema screen? Let us know in the comments below!

The Laundromat will be released on Netflix worldwide on October 18, 2019.