In a sentenceThe crooks host the show, and the widow they robbed has to wait her turn to speak
Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep) is newly widowed, and when she goes looking for the money she is owed she finds nobody who will say who owes it. The trail leads, by way of men played by David Schwimmer and Jeffrey Wright, to a law firm in Panama. That firm’s partners, Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas), narrate the film straight to camera, breaking the business of shell companies into chapters with a small story attached to each. Steven Soderbergh directs, shoots and edits from Scott Z. Burns’s script, which draws on the Panama Papers leak. Melissa Rauch, Robert Patrick and Will Forte appear along the way.
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Soderbergh and Burns turn the Panama Papers into a 96-minute revue hosted by the villains, talking straight to camera. Streep’s widow gives it a heart it keeps wandering away from, then asks us to be angry on her behalf anyway.
Steven Soderbergh’s account of the Panama Papers runs 96 minutes and is hosted by the two men whose firm the papers came from. Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) talk straight to camera and explain money from the beginning. Scott Z. Burns’s script then breaks the scandal into chapters, each with a small story attached. It is a decent way to explain something that resists explaining. It is a poor way to build a film around a person, and this one has a person it keeps putting down.
She is Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), a widow trying to find out who owes her what and why nobody will say. David Schwimmer and Jeffrey Wright turn up along the way, each a link in a chain that leads back to Panama. Streep plays Ellen as a woman who has been polite all her life and is now discovering, phone in hand, what politeness buys. We felt the anger build in her and in us over those calls: the hold music, the second number, the man who cannot say who he works for. It is the best stretch of the film, and Soderbergh leaves it far too soon.
Oldman and Banderas are the reason he leaves. Oldman does a German accent that a school revue would send back; Banderas is silkier and more amused, and the better of the two. Ellen Mirojnick dresses them like men who have never been told no, and Soderbergh, shooting it himself, puts them in flat, bright, saturated frames, a beach like a brochure, a bar like a set. The look suits them: men who sell cardboard companies living in a cardboard world. But they are on screen a great deal, they are having a good time, and by the third occasion they assure us it is all perfectly legal the film has started having a good time with them.
The other chapters are where it comes apart. They go off to other countries and other crooks, none of them has a Streep in it, and they play like sketches cut from a longer, better-organised film. Soderbergh edits as well, and he cuts between the strands cleanly enough, but there is nothing for the cuts to connect. Howard Cummings builds the Panama offices as glass and beige, rooms in which nothing is meant to happen, and David Holmes scores the whole thing as a caper, organ and brushed drums, so that even the widow’s chapter bounces along when it might have been allowed to hurt. We were bored by the chapters without her, which is odd, because on paper they are the most dramatic things here.
The Big Short did this four years earlier, with the same direct address and the same famous faces explaining paperwork, and The Laundromat knows it and does not mind. The better comparison is closer to home. Burns wrote Contagion for Soderbergh in 2011, and that film followed half a dozen strands across the world and never lost hold of one of them. Here they have a widow with a stronger claim on our attention than any of those strands and keep handing the camera to the men who cheated her.
We had stopped caring somewhere in the second half, and the fault was the film’s: it spends forty minutes telling us how clever the fraud was and about eight telling us who paid for it, then asks us to be angry on the widow’s behalf as if it had not been the one changing the subject. Most critics landed about where we have, some finding it fun while it lasts, more finding it a lecture with sketches, and we do not think either camp is wrong.
It is 96 minutes and rated 15. Watch it at home on a week night. Streep’s phone calls are worth that much, and the rest will go past without asking much of you.
Most critics find Soderbergh’s Panama Papers comedy a muddle. The reviews lean negative: roughly half call it messy, scattershot or glib, and only a handful recommend it. Where praise gathers, it gathers around Meryl Streep, whose wronged widow is repeatedly named as the film’s anchor, and several reviews single out her closing direct address to camera as the one moment that lands. The ambition of explaining offshore finance through skits is credited even by those who think it fails.
The reservations cluster around structure and tone. The episodic vignettes, celebrity cameos and fourth-wall breaks are said to leave the film without narrative glue, and The New Yorker argues that the villains, played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, enjoy themselves so much that the satire revels in what it condemns. The Evening Standard calls it an indignant lecture. The spread is wide: The Playlist and /Film find it breezy and better than expected, and Vulture thinks the explaining is worth the labour.
Soderbergh delivers a playful, uneven globetrotting comedy that surveys financial chicanery with wit and self-aware trickery, but it lacks a fully satisfying resolution or depth.
Read the full review →The critic sees the film as a star-powered experimental wake-up call on offshore accounts that chutes-and-ladders its way to distraction but keeps its eyes on the prize.
Read the full review →Soderbergh delivers a patchwork of comic vignettes on the Panama Papers that is fun while it lasts but feels haphazard and doesn't fully land, though the final direct plea for change is striking.
Read the full review →The film tries to enliven its urgent subject of global financial corruption with breezy irreverence and skits, but ends up feeling like a textbook lark rather than a deep exploration.
Read the full review →Soderbergh and Burns opt for a light-hearted comedy approach to the Panama Papers scandal rather than a straight exposé, but the result is wispy and uneven with flailing humour that undercuts its muckraking aims.
Read the full review →The film is a muddle trying to make sense of the Panama Papers scandal through episodic stories and fourth-wall breaks, feeling self-satisfied and frustrating despite some charm and a righteous message. Streep's widow anchors it but is sidelined among cameos.
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The Big ShortThe same direct-address explainer, four years earlier and with a firmer grip on its people.
ContagionSoderbergh and Burns follow a dozen strands round the world and drop none of them.
Inside JobThe crash explained without sketches; the anger arrives on its own and stays.
Margin CallOne night in a bank, quiet and exact, where nobody needs to break the fourth wall.
Le Capital · not reviewed yetCosta-Gavras on a French banker with no scruples; drier, colder and more patient than this.
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