Steven Soderbergh’s new film, “The Laundromat” sprawls across numerous countries, covering varying languages and locales. In a scene in the first act, we follow a Latina in Panama. She works for a corrupt organisation and, unbeknownst to her, is part of a global enterprise of corruption. But for now, she’s just a tired woman making her way home on the bus. The bus breaks down and she gets off to walk, and an out-of-nowhere accident sees her embroiled in electrical wire. She dies. This isn’t a major plot-point. In fact, the moment is only important for us to dispose of her character. We met her a few minutes ago, and she’s not important. So unimportant that her horrifying death is edited as if it’s a punchline. And, the audience I was with got that. They laughed and laughed. I cringed and wrote five questions marks in my notebook. That just about sums up my response to “The Laundromat”, a film that feels like something from an alternate universe that I keep trying to make sense of.
In a May 2016 statement, John Doe, who leaked 11.5 million documents revealing confidential information about financial corruption the previous year, the “Panama Papers,” revealed part of his rationale for his actions, which placed him in so much danger. Income inequality was cited as one of his main reasons as the corruption of those implicated revealed how the rich continue to exploit the poor for economic gain. Corruption is, of course, as old as man. And, in 2019, corruption continues to grow on a worldwide scale. Beyond the individual inequalities on a person-to-person level, we live in a world where East and West (or North and South) colonial dynamics have destroyed the Global South. Where countries inhabited by persons of colour tend to exist in relation to the “goodwill” of mostly white countries. Racial and structural inequalities around the world are only exacerbated by economic inequality. So, it means something very specific that “The Laundromat” feels so shrouded in whiteness. For the team behind “The Laundromat,” the most incisive image of economic inequality is Meryl Streep.
After a jolly irreverent opening with our two narrators riffing on the history of money, “The Laundromat” settles its story on an elderly couple. Ellen, played by Streep, and Joe Martin are a congenial pair off to take a ferry ride with friends. Their anniversary is coming up. Their lives seem as far away as possible from any economic corruption. But a happenstance accident on the ferry boat kills Joe. This freak accident, unlike that of the Latina character in Panama later on, is not played for laughs. There’s a beautifully macabre shot of Joe floating in the water that lingers – an excellent bit of cinematography. Ellen is unable to file a claim against the boat company for reasons she’s not certain of. This is the beginning point of a labyrinth of information involving shady dealings, shell companies, fraud and murder. Corruption is everywhere we will soon learn, and Ellen must get to the bottom of it. For Joe.
And so, we hop from North America to the Caribbean to Central America to Asia. Here there and back again as we realise how a tiny case of terrible insurance is part of a gargantuan level of corruption. Writer Scott Z. Burns uses a pair of charmingly disgusting narrators (the revelation of who they are and where they are is wonderfully deployed) to explain to us how this corruption works. And as we hop from continent to continent, we keep returning to Ellen, who is the audience surrogate, to carry us through this film. And, Ellen is a more than dependable surrogate. She’s sympathetic, thoughtful and with enough gumption to root for her.
Burns and Soderbergh clearly care about this story. They recognise the insidiousness at the root of the corruption and they also want to ensure that they’re making the film compelling enough for the audience to pay attention. They also recognise that audiences don’t want to be taught too heavily. And nothing is less cool than being serious. And “The Laundromat” desperately wants to be cool, turning into a manifestation of the postmodern ironic gaze that regards everything with detachment and a sharp stroke of whimsy as if to charm us with the coolness of what’s on-screen. But the detachment isn’t the real trouble. The trouble is recognising where and how Soderbergh and Burns deploy this detachment and realising just who they decide to include or exclude from expressions of empathy.
And what that consideration reveals is a film overwhelmed by its own myopia. “The Laundromat” is Americana writ large. Which is fine. It’s an American film. But, it’s also a film that invokes real world issues, such as the use of Latin American bodies to aid corruption that they are often unaware of, the racial dynamics of class in the Caribbean and the implications for economics in the region, and the structural inequalities that mean that so often the most affected tend to be on the fringes of society. Loathe as I am to dictate what a movie does, it strains credulity to consider the mass of stories coming out of the Panama Papers and to centre this incredibly myopic perspective. There’s something smug and unaware in choosing this lens for this story. The film ends with a representation of the Statue of Liberty that’s meant to be a rallying call of sorts. America writ large. And, white America specifically. And what’s chilling is that no one in the film seems to get that.
Late in the film, a black college graduate – a continental African living in America – realises her father’s finances are not what she thought they were. She’s offered a chance to manage a shell company and attain a quick 100 million dollars. No big deal. She’s cautious about the “position”. She isn’t qualified. “My degree is in ethnic identity!” You can feel the film waiting for the audience to react. It’s meant to be a punch-line. Like so many moments in the film, this one announces itself, waiting for us to laugh. And, the audience I watched it with roared. What were they laughing at? Was it the idea that anyone would have degree in ethnic identity? Was it that such a degree would be pointless in this job? Was it something else? It’s representative of how “The Laundromat” goes about itself. On its own the moment is innocuous but by the time it had happened I had been worn down by the film’s myopia, and its perspective on non-Americans and persons of colour. The film features numerous characters of colour, but Soderbergh and Burns see them only as punchlines, as a means to an end, and by the end it seemed so removed from the real-world economic inequalities that it seems to want to discuss. All this technical proficiency in the service of what? When it was all over, I could only ask: What was the point of it all?
