The Laundromat

Showing on Netflix

I am a fan of Steven Soderbergh’s kind of films, fictional stories like Oceans 11 or similar but more factual tales like Adam Mackay’s, Big Short which look to explore the complexities of a heist or scandal where one group exploits another through a selection of well crafted vignettes.

That’s the ground The Laundromat occupies as it tries to shed light on the murky world of money laundering, tax avoidance and corruption at a global scale that was exposed by the leaking of the “Panama Papers” and is based on Jake Bernstein’s book.

While all the component parts where there for me to enjoy it never quite delivers. The story weaves its way through global corruption but is grounded by Meryl Streep’s Ellen Martin who loses her husband in a boat accident alongside 20 others and it is a fraudulent insurance policy that introduces us to global firm Mossack Fonseca with Gary Oldman’s Mossack (channelling a heavy dose of Werner Herzog) and Antonio Banderas’s Fonseca who narrate us through the murky world their company dealt with.

The film for me was at its most interesting while it remained closely related to Martin’s story as she tries to understand how nobody is responsible for her husband’s death but as the film drifts off into other threads, which while important in trying to show the global scale and senior levels of government around the world involved in allowing the very wealthiest in society to exploit laws and facilities not available to the vast majority, the less engaged I felt by the story telling.

While there is lots of interesting things in this and a selection of good performances, Streep in particular, the story is a complex one and for me that lack of an emotional core to tie it to meant at times I lost the relevance of some of the vignettes. What it does do well is show the complexity and scope of this kind of tax avoidance and ability for those with the means to use it while it suits governments around the world to allow them and for that it should be admired, but for me it didn’t wholly work in the way it told it.

An interesting but not completely well told story.