![]() Oh yes: Meryl Streep is in this movie, and for a portion of it, she’s a delight. The Laundromat instead clips along a flat line to the end-and then there’s Meryl Streep to send us home with a final, impassioned message about corporate tax responsibility. There’s no sense of cumulative momentum in the movie, there’s no feeling that piece after piece is settling against one another before the final mosaic is revealed. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going. The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. We travel to China, California, Lake George (Lake Arrowhead plays the part), Nevis, and Panama. They’re pretty much all too archly pitched, though, each too preoccupied with their individual stories to tether themselves to the larger narrative. The film is divided into what I guess you could call vignettes, each highlighting a different aspect of all this wealth malfeasance. Soderbergh is a bit too hepped up on funny ideas to keep his focus throughout. They speak in coy aphorism and metaphor, when the whole point of a movie like this is to tell it to us straight-or straight with a twist, at least. The device would be useful if only Burns hadn’t written these narrators so confusingly. They’re playing the lawyers Fonseca and Mossack, who ran the Panamanian law firm at the center of the scandal, but they hover over the film with more omnipotence than that. Trying to guide us through all this are Antonio Banderas (looking fab) and Gary Oldman (lugging around a heavy German accent), dual Virgils pointing out various appalling aspects of an inferno of grift and greed. Burns (whose own upcoming movie The Report is a more somber kind of explication), roughly and broadly details what was revealed by the Panama Papers, a 2015 document leak that laid bare a whole lotta shell company tax avoidance and money laundering done by many of the world’s powerful elite. The film, written by longtime Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z. Perhaps seeing that success and thinking, "Hey, I wanna try that," as he so often does, the peripatetic director Steven Soderbergh has made his own explainer movie, The Laundromat, which premiered here at the Venice International Film Festival on Sunday. It works, despite its vague air of smugness. It’s a jumble of a movie, but it makes a complex, urgent topic happily digestible. McKay used graphics and asides he broke the fourth wall he peppered in some wry celebrity cameos. ![]() The most successful recent film in this didactic form-essentially fictionalized Michael Moore movies-was probably Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about a particularly cynical exploitation of the late-aughts financial crisis. There are thousands of well-produced YouTube videos that do this. ![]() The web site Vox sort of began on this premise. The systems of corruption and injustice that we little people spend so much time railing against these days are so huge and complex-Byzantine by deliberate design-that it’s no wonder we’re so hungry for explainers, for media that does the noble work of breaking it down into manageable parts, giving our outrage the righteous shape of clarity. ![]() It does not store any personal data.Everything is so complicated. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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