Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas in THE LAUNDROMAT
Steven Soderbergh’s disappointing The Laundromat takes on the Panama Papers scandal of 2015, in which the shady law firm of Mossack Fonseca enabled hundreds of global fraudsters and tax cheats. Intended as an expose of financial malfeasance, it only succeeds as a demonstration of cinematic waste. There’s way too much talent harnessed to result in such a shallow imitation of The Big Short.
Meryl Streep plays an Everywoman who gets swindled by a corrupt system and by individual crooks played by Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas and Jeffrey Wright. If there’s anything worthy about this film, it’s Oldman and Banderas, who get to break the fourth wall and blithely explain their cons to the camera – the same function that Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, filled in The Big Short.
There just isn’t anything to engage the audience here. Worse, The Laundromat muddles it message by toggling between what’s legal and what’s not. The film explicitly claims that the crookedness depicted is legal, but it actually shows lots and lots of fraud – and fraud is already illegal. The real scandal, of course, is that the system is rigged so the big financial interests can LEGALLY screw the rest of us
It all culminates in a corny final shot that not even Streep can make convincing or palatable. If you MUST watch this crap, it’s streaming on Netflix.
The Post may be a docudrama, but it plays as a thriller and an astonishingly insightful portrait of Katharine Graham by Meryl Streep. It’s one of the best movies of the year – and one of the most important.
Essentially, this movie is about a corporate decision, but master storyteller Steven Spielberg sets it up as a tick-tock, high stakes thriller. Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) must decide whether to publish the Pentagon Papers at a moment when her company is most vulnerable to market forces and government intimidation. Nothing less than the American principle of freedom of the press hangs in the balance.
The Post also delivers the personal and feminist transformation of Katharine Graham, learning to move beyond her Mad Men Era roles as wife/mother/socialite andto , for the first time, assume real, not titular, command of a business empire. And she goes All In on the ballsiest gamble any CEO could make. To say that Streep brings Graham to life is inadequate. Streep IS Graham. It sometimes seems like Streep can get an Oscar nomination without even making a movie, but this performance is one of Streep’s very best.
Spielberg surrounds Streep with a dazzling cast. Tom Hanks lowers the pitch of his voice and becomes the swashbuckling editor Ben Bradlee. Tracy Letts gives us another fine performance, this time as Graham’s financial guru Fritz Beebe. As Bradlee’s second wife Tony, Sarah Paulson ignites a monologue with her piercing eyes.
Bruce Greenwood is quite brilliant as Robert McNamara, Graham’s old friend and the architect (and unwilling sta) of the Pentagon Papers. Greenwood is such an overlooked actor, and he’s so reliably good (he was even good in Wild Orchid, for Chrissakes).
The Pentagon Papers was the 7,000-page secret official history of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Commissioned by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Pentagon Papers chronicled the years of bad decisions by the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations and, especially, the deceitfulness of JFK’s and LBJ’s public optimism about the War. The truth was that the US government knew that the war was unwinnable and that it was only prolonged because nobody knew how to get out while saving face. The US President in 1971, Richard Nixon, was following the same course, unnecessarily wasting the lives of another 20,000 Americans during his term of office; the ruthless Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger were desperate to keep the Pentagon Papers secret. A private sector defense expert, Daniel Ellsberg, had access to the Pentagon Papers and sought to have them published, and The Post tells this story, which takes the audience from a jungle firefight into the courtroom of the US Supreme Court.
Baby Boomers will appreciate being transported back to quaint 1971 technology: typewriters, one-page-at-a-time Xerox machines, rotary pay phones, real typeset and ink presses. (And cigarette smoking in restaurants and cigars in the workplace.)
I’ve also written an essay on some of the historical figures and events depicted in The Post: historical musings on THE POST.
The Post is worth seeing for Streep’s performance, for the history (incredibly important at this moment in the nation’s history) and for the sheer entertainment value. One of the year’s best.
The Oscar nominations are out, and there are few of the head scratching inclusions and omissions that we frequently see. Of the Best Picture nominations, The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo and Midnight in Paris all made my Best Movies of 2011. Although they didn’t make my Best of the Year list, War Horse and Moneyball are very good movies that I recommend. I haven’t yet seen The Help, which is, by all accounts, a fine film. Although I hated The Tree of Life, it was the biggest art film of the year and much praised by mainstream critics. The one jaw dropper is the critically scorned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which exploits 9/11 in the pursuit of a three hankie weeper.
My biggest disappointments were the snubbing of Michael Shannon’s performance in Take Shelter and the innovative screenplay by Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman for Young Adult.
The acting categories seem a little light to me this year with the exception of Best Actress, with two performances for the ages by Michele Williams in My Week with Marilyn and Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.
Meryl Streep is the finest actress of our lifetimes, a fact reemphasized by her performance in The Iron Lady. Streep plays two Margaret Thatchers. In flashbacks, she plays Thatcher in her prime – seizing power and wielding it with complete confidence and absolutely without a nano whit of mercy. She also plays today’s elderly Thatcher, doddering on the verge of dementia. Streep is magnificent, which might be enough reason to see the movie.
It’s also always a pleasure to watch Jim Broadbent, and he teams with Streep as Thatcher’s hubbie. Alexandra Roach plays a third and younger Thatcher – forming herself in her early twenties. The fine actor Nicholas Farrell is also quite good as one of Thatcher’s mentors.
My problem is with the story. Now I’m no expert on Thatcher, although I have loathed her from afar for decades. To me, the most interesting aspect of Thatcher was her certitude – the absolutely deep and profound belief that she was always right and the will to impose her direction on everyone else. When her actions were creating widespread pain and she was hated (really, really hated) by a large percentage of her own people, why did she not doubt herself for a moment? The Iron Lady explains her conservatism as coming from her father, but leaves her certitude unexamined.
Instead, The Iron Lady‘s screenplay chooses to focus on her feminism, battling to make her way in an arena filled with men especially eager not to relinquish any power to her. (Her feminism seems to be entirely in practice, not theory, as she battles for HER due, but not to make the way easier for other women, whom she probably expects to pull themselves up by their own pumps.)
A lot of screen time is also devoted to her aged decline, which gives good fodder to Streep, but is not very important to understanding her career.
On the other hand, The Iron Lady does depict the very personal impact of the IRA’s campaign against her, with an assassination attempt and the killing of a close colleague. It also gives us an unsparing look at her bullying of friends and allies, which, of course, does not encourage loyalty. And there are telling glimpses into her family life, especially her longtime marriage.
But on the whole, The Iron Lady is long on Streep and short on understanding what made Margaret Thatcher the pivotal political leader that she was.
