Meryl Streep leads a stellar cast in Steven Soderbergh’s quirky but uneven journey to the dark heart of wealth management…

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Screenwriter:  Scott Z. Burns

Based on: The non-fiction book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite, by Jake Bernstein.

Synopsis:

*Spoilers* While on a vacation, Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep) loses her husband in a boating accident. When her lawyer tries to claim compensation from the company, it is revealed that its insurance policy has ended up in the hands of a shell corporation in Nevis, which is under investigation for fraud. Ellen sets out to uncover what’s going on. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the daughter of an African billionaire finds out he’s cheating on her mother with her roommate. To buy her silence, he gives her bearer shares in a $20m company, which later turn out to be worthless. In China, intermediary Neil Maywood’s attempts to pressure a Chinese family over a money laundering operation ends in murder. Throughout, Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) relay the story of how they built their successful law firm in Panama, which was brought down by a leak that exposed the dealings of their super-wealthy clients and the offshore shell corporations set up by the lawyers.

Analysis:

*Spoilers* The Big Short (2015) pulled off an impressive feat. It took the obscurity of the credit default swap (CDS) and the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) to produce an original, informative, humorous and accessible look at the 2007/08 financial crisis. The Laundromat tries – and unfortunately largely fails – to pull off a similar feat with the Panama Papers, a 2016 scandal, in which the secret dealings of the super-wealthy clients of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca were leaked to the world. In place of the dodgy CDSs and CDOs, here the main culprit is the offshore shell corporation, an on-paper-only company registered in a location with favourable tax laws, whose only purpose is to act as a vehicle in which the wealthy can shelter their assets.

The difference is that while Short tells a linear story with humorous asides, Laundromat feels directionless and unengaging. This is a pity, as things get off to a strong start, with Oldman and Banderas’ jovial double-act contrasting with Streep struggling with her bereavement and then being screwed out of a just financial resolution.

However, when we veer away from Streep and her emotionally raw anger, things go awry. Instead of focusing on this plot strand, we head off on a round-the-world trip that tries to show us ‘how things really work’.

So, we spend way too much time with a self-righteous philandering billionaire in LA, who buys off his obnoxious, foul-mouthed daughter with ultimately worthless bearer shares to keep her quiet about his screwing around. We divert to China for some money-laundering and bribery, plus a little organ harvesting for good measure. We meet an under-pressure shell company director from Nevis getting more than he bargained for when he’s arrested in Miami, and we even fit in a quick trip to Mexico for a discussion over whether Neil Diamond actually wrote Red, Red Wine (of course, he did!). Each time, we return to the caricature-ish Mossack and Fonseca dressed in ever nicer suits, as they tell us their side of the story.

It all feels laboured. The quirkiness is crowbarred in to keep our interest, while we are continually bludgeoned with the obvious fact that among the uber-rich, there is a vast connected multi-national grey area, in which money-laundering, secrecy, immorality, avoidance, evasion, and violent criminal behaviour co-exist, unabated and unchallenged. We don’t even get a sense of the sizeable fall-out that occurred following the leak of the 11m documents.

The fact that the non-Streep subplots – or, given their screen time, plot strands – involve unsympathetic, unrelatable characters getting what they deserve doesn’t help the film’s cause. Nether does the use of familiar faces, who pop up in brief inconsequential cameos, such as Sharon Stone as the realtor who shafts Streep in a condo sale.

However, the main reason why Short works and Laundromat is less successful is that the stakes don’t seem as high. While Short focuses on a group of rich, slick investment professionals, it never loses sight of the fact that the reverberations of what they were doing were felt by everyday folk who lost their jobs and homes. But by continually pulling us away from Streep and using her plot as almost an afterthought, the overall effect is a big shoulder shrug. Rich people pay lawyers and accountants to shelter their wealth from the taxman and regular people get shafted along the way. And…?

We don’t even get any real closure on the Streep plot (other than a satisfied nod when she sees President Obama on TV railing against the laws that allowed the financial shenanigans to go on in the first place), so there’s no satisfying emotional pay-off.

We’re meant to feel Streep’s outrage, but the world in which Mossack and Fonseca operated is so removed from most people’s lives that the connection to us needs to be stronger in order for the impact of what they facilitated to really land with any emotional weight.