The Laundromat: Confusing and Messy
The Laundromat is a 2019 film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z Burns inspired by the 2017 book Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers. It follows the release of the 2015 Panama Papers incident in which 11.5 million documents were leaked that detailed information on over 200,000 offshore entities. It revealed a large-scale tax avoidance and illegal activities from many rich people in powerful positions. It dives into the world of the workings of offshore bank accounts, shell companies and other means the super-wealthy use to hide their riches and avoid taxes.
The film opens with Jurgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramon Fonesca (Antonio Banderas) addressing the audience directly to begin the story of how the rich and powerful grow and hide their money. The audience is then introduced to Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep). A heart-breaking incident occurs that sends her on an investigative journey that puts her in contact with major players involved in the Panama Papers. She is trying to get to the bottom of the whole situation.
The structure of The Laundromat shifts into side stories to explain pieces of the thievery or drive a message. These side stories include cameos from other well-known actors to relay these messages to audiences. Their appearances are spread out one by one so they aren't competing with one another for the viewer's attention. The addresses serve the purpose to explain to the viewer what is going on while the story of Streep's character is to provide a channel to show the emotional impact that these actions had on real people. The Panama Papers reveal the recurring theme of the film that the poor people are not aware and the system is run by people who benefit from tax cuts and have little motivation to call for change.
Soderbergh and Burns use this film as a call for action with its strong political point of view. It is an overview of a complicated event. It gives audiences a lesson about the Panama Papers while also entertaining them with performances by some of the top actors. This film is a hard sell for people to watch in theaters so putting it on a streaming service like Netflix was the right call. People are becoming more interested in documentaries and stories of whistleblowers about events that the public may have not had knowledge about. Burns and Soderbergh attempt to pull a The Big Short in their format ad structure but miss their mark in handling this complex event that demands the full attention of viewers to understand what is occurring.