THE LAUNDROMAT: Soderbergh’s Scattered, Didactic Satire Of Global Wealth

A mere eight months after the release of the iPhone-shot High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh is back with The Laundromat, a splashy, star-studded look at the world of obscene wealth and financial wrong-doing. Scripted by frequent Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z. Burns (who also directed this November’s The Report), this cinematic chronicle of the Panama Papers saga aims to serve as another urgent satire of our modern condition, a film that wants to lampoon the absurdity of contemporary capitalism through fourth-wall breaks and amusing cutaways, while also functioning as a direct, impassioned call to arms.

Like The Big Short, Vice, The Report, The Post, and probably a whole slew of predecessors I’m not even thinking of at the moment, the director’s latest weaponizes our current political turmoil to suggest that, throughout recent history, we have not been angry enough at the people in charge of our societal order.

This is not a bad message or a typically unsuccessful narrative template—though since The Big Short, I’d argue that it’s been a severe case of diminishing returns. But in The Laundromat, Hollywood’s series of well-meaning political statements reaches its nadir. There’s no questioning the righteousness of Soderbergh‘s anger, nor the good intentions of everyone involved. Yet this is an excessively, brutally didactic film that ultimately feels quite hypocritical; it’s more of a scolding lecture than a scathing indictment. And considering the unfocused narrative and squandered potential, it’s safe to call The Laundromat one of the year’s worst.

A Terrible Accident & An Unusual Discovery

In the film’s initial half, Soderbergh splits his focus between two groups of characters. We’re first introduced to Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas), two powerful lawyers for the infamous Mossack-Fonseca firm, which assisted the rich and powerful in their construction of a rigged economy. These charismatic and villainous figures do occasionally exist in the narrative of the film, but they’re primarily an outside presence, here to explain to viewers the nitty-gritty details of this corrupt universe. In the opening scene, Mossack and Fonseca dramatize the long history of money, chronicling everything from the barter system to the dawn of paper money and the complexities of the current system.

The Laundromat‘s more sympathetic lead is Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), a retiree whose placid life is struck by an unforeseen tragedy. One day, Ellen and her husband (James Cromwell) take a river cruise to Niagara Falls, only for the boat to be overturned by a sudden and unexpected wave. Ellen’s husband dies in the tragic accident, and she’s left to rebuild her life in the wake of this profound loss. Theoretically, she should get a massive chunk of insurance money—but that proves to be much more difficult than she initially imagined.

In her quest to get her due payment, Ellen encounters an entire global network of fraud and dishonesty, riddled with fake companies and members of the 1% avoiding the payment of their fair share of taxes. With Ellen’s discovery and a series of other bizarre, uncanny coincidences, the house of cards holding up Mossack-Fonseca—and, as a result, the entire modern order of high society—begins to crumble.

Scattered Narrative, Disastrous Ending

There are some choices in The Laundromat that I will never fully understand, no matter how hard I try. In short, I don’t know how you waste a heartbreaking, emotionally charged premise—the shocking death of several people, and a woman’s subsequent fight with an infuriating system—in favor of needless asides and strange comedic overtones. The first half of this film is genuinely engaging, primarily because perennial Oscar nominee Meryl Streep is doing some fabulous work as a grieving widow with modest expectations for her new life. When Streep is playing Ellen Martin (an important distinction when it comes to this movie), she’s phenomenal: her fury, confusion, and heartbreak are all conveyed on a primal level. A scene where she purchases a Las Vegas penthouse, only to be told that it’s been sold to Russian benefactors, is one of the more subdued highlights of a film that’s always desperate to impress.

For a while, it appears as if Soderbergh will follow Ellen’s investigation of the Mossack/Fonseca/Boncamper (a shady liaison played by Jeffrey Wright) trio, slowly unraveling the true nature of these shady endeavors. Coupled with the ironic, clever style that the film commits to from its opening scene, this setup promises a potent combination of an intriguing procedural investigation and a series of unique trappings.

Inexplicably, this is not what happens at all.

For reasons I cannot rationalize or explain, The Laundromat becomes something of an anthology film; it extensively follows the extramarital affair of a wealthy businessman (Nonso Anozie) for several scenes, only to delve into a weird incident in the world of Chinese organ harvesting without much in the way of a natural progression. Re-watching the opening scene for this review, I was struck by Mossack and Fonseca’s note that they intend to share a series of “fairy tales” about the very real world of the wealthy. Yet even with that preordained caveat in mind, there’s little narrative or emotional rhyme or reason to this structure.

Needlessly Preachy & Obvious Filmmaking

Sure, these detours and individual moments would possibly be interesting and amusing on their own, but in the context of the story that Soderbergh establishes, it feels aimless and unnecessary. Ellen eventually does re-enter the picture, but by the time she returns to the forefront of the narrative, it’s too little, too late. With the final collapse of Mossack-Fonseca’s scheme impending, there’s no time to give a satisfying ending to our main heroine’s story.

Then again, I’m not really sure if narrative satisfaction is the name of Soderbergh‘s game here. He wants to give us the sense that the weak are getting completely steamrolled by the rich; the film posits that the Biblical notion of “the meek shall inherit the Earth” is utter hogwash, a lie that has stretched for generations. Maybe this lack of finality is deliberate—a provocation that reflects the real-life exploitation and emptiness at the heart of many of these financial systems.

Or maybe it’s just the final product of a film that never truly knows what it wants to be or who it wants to be about, a film that eventually spirals into a billion parallel directions without ever latching onto anything meaningful. The Laundromat comes in with a message and a clear aesthetic style, but it doesn’t know what story it’s telling. As a result, it settles for didactic speechifying; with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Soderbergh nails his point home. The film begins with a wink and a nudge, only to end with a direct address that feels like it was designed to become a viral video. By all accounts, this is a disappointing trajectory.

The Laundromat: Conclusion

With an interesting subject, arguably the world’s greatest actress, and an esteemed filmmaker, how is The Laundromat such an enormous folly? I can’t explain its narrative choices—its use of Mossack and Fonseca as narrators is unsuccessful, and its sidelining of Ellen Martin in favor of random anecdotes is baffling. But I think its earnestness is a large source of its failure.

By the time Streep is reciting the exact words of the whistleblower, culminating in a final shot where she poses as the Statue of Liberty, my eyes involuntarily rolled into the back of my skull—any other reaction to this scene is unfathomable. Yes, the message is good (even necessary!), but when it’s delivered from wealthy actors and producers in the form of what often feels like an incoherent, spruced-up PowerPoint presentation, it comes off as both outrageously heavy-handed and naive.

What did you think of The Laundromat? Which of Steven Soderbergh’s 2019 films did you enjoy the most? Let us know in the comments below!

The Laundromat was released on Netflix worldwide on October 18, 2019.