“Laundromat,” May We Laugh?

Movie Review: “The Laundromat,” directed by Steven Soderbergh, 96 minutes

Some stories are too big, too complicated, and too world shaking to be covered in a single movie. The scope of the crimes revealed by an unknown whistleblower in the Panama Papers is more than one can comprehend in a single sitting.

Eleven million documents from the law firm of Mossack Fonseca showed how filthy and how rich some of the filthy rich are, and a little bit of how they hang on to their riches and filthiness without paying taxes. I would suggest two long-running TV shows: a drama about how it works and a series of legal proceedings to bring the thousands (millions?) of filthy culprits to justice.

But Director Soderbergh, bolstered by terrific film actors Meryl Streep, Gary Oldham, and Antonio Banderas, did what he could in one film. Faced with tragedy of this amazing extent, the only way to tell it in brief was with a comedy. Oldham and Banderas play the two lawyers, Streep plays one of their many victims.

“The Laundromat” calls attention to a great problem in our world of skyrocketing inequality, but it’s not really a good movie. That is, it’s not entertaining. It’s more of a moral sermonette. What happened, what is happening, is too big and too awful to be a good movie.

You can see it in theaters and on Netflix.

–Gene Lantz

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