Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat is a silly film about about subject matter that is anything but, a deliberately lighthearted choice of tone and cadence that didn't sit too well well me given the grim financial atrocities entailed in this true story. Meryl Streep is a middle class elderly woman whose husband (James Cromwell) is killed in a river boating accident. When his life insurance policy suspiciously fails to cough up the cash, she follows the poisoned breadcrumb trail back to two scumbag Panama City lawyers (Gary Oldman & Antonio Banderas) who are running an elaborate offshore scam using shell companies and various operatives. Soderbergh makes the bizarrely vaudevillian decision to have Banderas and Oldman (the latter trying on a jarring, uncharacteristically bad German accent no less) narrate the whole thing as their characters in fourth wall breaking meta fashion and the template is just... weird, obnoxious and insulting to a very sobering matter. I understand the impulse to use these gimmicks to bring a bit of levity to a depressing story (Adam McKay tried this in his cluttered misfire The Big Short) but I think the film would have fared better if Steven had taken the somber, meditative, fractured yet ultimately straightforward approach to it like he did the illegal drug trade in his brilliant Traffic. Oldman and Banderas strut around like two fabulous peacocks and try every kooky mannerism in the book to win us over, somehow swallowing up Streep's workmanlike performance in the process, no easy feat. Soderbergh also does this other odd gimmick where he cuts away from the main story to several interminable asides that are happening elsewhere in the world and are only very tenuously connected to the main story, feeling like dislocated story elements that never shift into a discernible place. There are a ton of cameos including Robert Patrick, Rosalind Chao, Jeffrey Wright, David Schwimmer, Will Forte, Sharon Stone and more but they feel like trendy accessories rather than indispensable factors in the story. Something very specific was attempted with the material here, and unfortunately it just didn't work, at all.
Review of The Laundromat
