A look at the great financial shell game

Director Steven Soderbergh brings a comic touch to The Laundromat, a story based on the Panama Papers scandal.

Director Steven Soderbergh aims at the absurdities of a wealth-obsessed world in The Laundromat, a Netflix movie that feels like a collection of skits revolving around the Panama Papers scandal of 2016.

That financial mess involved a massive leak of files showing how the very rich (or at least some of them) could use shell corporations to shield themselves from a variety of troublesome intrusions, matters such as income tax or various liabilities.

The Laundromat, which begs for comparison with 2015's livelier The Big Short, uses a variety of techniques to create a farrago of sketches, many presented with the kind of gimmickry that defies cinematic convention, everything from breaking the fourth wall to chapter headings such as The Meek Are Screwed.

The movie is held together by two figures played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas. They are, respectively, Oldman's Jurgen Mossack and Banderas's Ramon Fonesca, characters who might have popped out of a Pinter play. They often address the audience, acting as guides to the financial maneuvering at movie's core.

Speaking in a comic German accent, Oldman seems the more pragmatic of the duo. If there's romanticism in financial chicanery, Banderas finds it.

Ramon and Jurgen are lawyers who run a firm that specializes in creating shell companies. No questions asked. Secrecy respected. If these corporations lack substance ... well ... shouldn't wealthy people be allowed to park their cash somewhere without agents from the IRS crawling all over it?

Working from a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, Soderbergh tries to show how the damage caused by all this subterfuge can impact those whose financial calculations extend no further than trying to balance a checkbook.

Meryl Streep portrays Ellen Martin, a woman who loses her husband (James Cromwell) in a boating accident on Lake George, NY. Ellen believes that she will collect an insurance settlement from the boating company.

Ellen soon learns that the company had been duped by someone who sold it insurance from a company that wended its way toward the portfolio of an outfit that existed only on paper. Ellen turns up at various points in the story to remind us that all this high-flying finagling can actually connect to ordinary folks.

This portion of the movie introduces us to a character played by Jeffrey Wright, an accountant who lives in Nevis, a West Indian island off the beaten tourist track. Ellen shows up there to track down the company that owns the insurance company that was supposed to compensate her for her loss.

None of this is to say that The Laundromat has a great deal of bite. It's mostly bark presented by Soderbergh with the winking buoyancy of a caper movie.

As Soderbergh works his way through the story, the movie makes a long stop at the palatial home of a wealthy man (Nonso Anozie) who's dallying with his daughter's college roommate. Anozie's Charles' approach to problem-solving: Award any aggrieved party with bearer shares that he claims are worth mega-millions.

Later, we meet a slick wheeler-dealer (Mathias Schoenaerts) who tries to exert his power over a Chinese woman (Rosalind Chao) who isn't going to fall so easily.

Put all this together and you have an airy concoction that amuses even if it doesn't pack the clout we might expect. By the end, I half wondered whether Soderbergh wasn't saying that any society that allows its economy to create financial instruments (i.e., paper) that have the appearance of worth without any reality to support them deserves what it gets — in the end, a handful of nothing.

Love that lands like a punch

Rust and Bone pulsates with life, romance and bare-knuckle boxing.

Director Jacques Audiard directs Rust and Bone, a romance between two people with bruised hearts, with refreshing boldness. Although some of the ingredients of Audiard's tale may sound familiar, they're given new life, thanks in part to the director's brash style and to a couple of vivid performances by actors playing two unlikely lovers.

Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) trains orca whales at Marineland, a seaside attraction in the town of Antibes on the Côte d'Azur. Alain (Mathias Schoenaerts), known as Ali, is a bare-knuckle fighter who meets Stephanie when he's working as a bouncer at The Annex, a rough Antibes nightclub.

Ali has a five-year-old son (Armand Verdure), but has no idea how to take care of the boy; he relies on his sister (Corinne Masiero) to tend to the child. It's clear that Ali is not trying to win any father-of-the-year awards. He plows from one situation to the next: head down, seldom looking too far into the future.

Into this already turbulent brew, Audiard adds a major shock: Stephanie loses both her legs when a whale jumps out of a pool during a performance. We begin to wonder whether Rust and Bone isn't going to settle into the rhythms of formula: Damaged beauty learns to live with her disability, perhaps with help of a back-street brawler.

It's just here that Audiard finds surprising success. He seems to understand that he's working with ingredients that could have inspired two separate movies, one about a woman's rehabilitation and another about a boxer finding his way back to his son. Instead of papering over differences, Audiard revels in the resultant collisions, allowing them to give the movie a sense of pulsating urgency.

Cotillard, whose legs were eliminated with skillful CGI work, creates a character who doesn't always react in expected ways. When she sees Ali fight for the first time, she smiles. She's a little thrilled by the violence -- and eventually, she takes over as Ali's manager, a role she assumes with confidence and pride.

The "romance" between Stephanie and Ali hardly has a hearts-and-flowers beginning. Ali, who never seems put off by his legless pal, sleeps with Stephanie after she tells him that she wonders if she still can have a sexual experience. He thinks she deserves a sex life, and offers his body in what appears to be part favor, part experiment.

Just because Ali sleeps with Stephanie doesn't mean that he's ready to curtail the rest of his sex life, which consists mostly of one-night stands that he conducts with near-aerobic zest.

Cotillard's acting prowess already is familiar to American audiences for her Oscar winning turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose or more recently for her work in The Black Knight Rises. Here, she makes a bitter beauty, a woman who's too strong to surrender control of her life.

Schoenaerts, who appeared in the hard-boiled Belgian movie Bullhead, is not nearly as well known to U.S. audiences, but he's perfectly cast. He tells Stephanie he fights for fun -- and he seems to mean it. His Ali is one of those characters who seems to operate totally in the present tense.

Best known for his landmark movie Prophet, Audiard allows the elements of his new movie to rub against one another in ways that can feel exciting. In a way, Rust and Bone is as much about bare-knuckle love as it is about bare-knuckle fighting.

Others have pointed out that, at heart, Rust and Bone is an old-fashioned movie. That's true, but it's to Audiard's credit that it seldom feels anything less than fresh.