Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas make a good pair. How the two haven’t been teamed up for more projects is a question to which there is no good answer. That said, they don’t make The Laundromat into a good film.
Adapted from the book of the same name (at least in the edition I read) by Jake Bernstein (though it’s also known as Secrecy World), The Laundromat is supposedly a documentary that takes you through the world of offshore tax havens and how they are used to prevent the taxman getting his hands on rich people’s money.
In reality, The Laundromat as its featured on Netflix is an attempt to use celebrities to simplify a deep and complex issue (as well as take your mind off the fact that celebrities are often beneficiaries of these arrangements). Just as with Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining sub-prime mortgages in The Big Short (where I guarantee you much of the audience wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying but to her), here the sight of Messrs Oldman and Banderas in a series of fancy suits talking you through how tax avoidance is perfectly legal doesn’t cover half as much as the book.
Bernstein’s prose by contrast manages to convey both the human side of the Panama Papers saga that forms the central part of his book (by featuring quotes from both Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca, the two man who ran the law firm named after them which was the centre of that political storm) but also its sheer scale. The sage covered everywhere from Iceland to China through a series of small territories, half of which are British.
The film by contrast narrows the drama down to the United States, where Meryl Streep attempts to find justice for James Cromwell to the background of a distraught David Schwimmer and Robert Patrick finding their victims of an insurance fraud; and China. Where Rosalind Chao (Keiko O’Brien to those in the know) poisons some unwary ex-spy.
In the book, the latter saga has a prominent place in the narrative, since it saw several lumanaries of the Communist establishment brought tumbling to Earth. Here, it takes up as much space as Patrick’s perfect look of shock and Schwimmer’s ordinary joe learning how the world is stacked against him.
Of Gerard Ryle and the International group of journalists who spent years gathering evidence and marshalling big news organisations, the film makes almost no mention. Given its length, this isn’t a huge surprise, but it adds up to a grimly predictable oversimplification that makes for disappointing television.
it doesn’t help that Netflix is currently showing The Spider’s Web, a documentary that focuses on Britain’s role as a hub for tax evasion, to the point where it and the network of offshore havens that are all British territory are described as a second, invisible empire every bit as powerful as the globe spanning empire that dominates the 19th century.
The Laundromat should have gone for a similar formula. Yes it could have kept Oldman and Banderas, who give wonderfully intriguing performances, but manage to reduce the very much real life men they are portraying to caricatures. The book by contrast gives them a very human edge as men who understood how to develop an exceedingly lucrative business model that brought them customers from all over the world. The book also leaves it to the reader to decide if these men are villains or simply the fall guys for something that goes on far more readily in economic superpowers like Britain and the United States that it does in Panama. A country that owes its very existence to US machinations at the start of the 20th century.
Therefore, by all means, go and buy the book. It’s a revelation in every sense of that word and accompanied by say the works of Roberto Salvano, will give you a new slant on how success in poorer parts of the world hinges on facilitating the whims and desire of those from far richer countries. As for this docudrama though, despite fine performances from all involved, don’t give it a second thought. Just avoid it.
All images for illustrative purposes/fair use only.
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