Chapter thirty-three: The Laundromat

So, I didn't blog last week, sadly. I was prepping, mostly emotionally, for my first in-person day of school since the 205 day quarantine/summer vacation As my Band teacher would say, what a time to be alive! Anyway, I think it would be good to get back to it, and thus restore at least some sense of normalcy.

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The Laundromat is a Netflix film about rabbit holes and insurance companies from the United States to Nevis through Panama and China. It's a mesh of entirely different, yet simultaneously shady and deceitful viewpoints that I do not have the mental capabilities to understand, but what I am able to understand is this: Ellen Martin's (Meryl's) vacation on Lake George turns sharply into an investigation after the boat that she and her husband Joe are touring on tips over and kills twenty-one people- her husband included. Now, the boat company is relying on their insurance policy for relief, but the (cheaper than usually priced) insurance company is refusing to pay because it's all fraud based in Nevis (an island off the Caribbean Sea.) Ellen, as a newly-grieving widow, puts an offer down on a new apartment in Vegas near the corner where she and Joe met, so that she will always be able to look out and see him standing at that corner even in death. But, Ellen's heart is yet again smashed when she is told that the apartment has been bought by "Russians who paid double the asking price in cash."

Then, in a meeting with her lawyer, Ellen is told, "The danm insurance company, The United Reinsurance Group of Nevis, they're the ones getting away with murder." Ellen puts the dots together and hypothesizes that the people in Nevis may have been the ones who bought her apartment, but more than anything, she's just a normal person who knows something is fishy and wants to talk to somebody, especially a person named Irvan Boncamper. When she travels to Nevis, the address in Ellen's coat pocket unexpectedly leads her to only a Post Office Box, and at the airport on her way home, Boncamper is arrested for fraud right there. Ellen also discovers that it wasn't just one person who bought her apartment; it was an entire company called New Century Enterprises of Panama.

Back home, Ellen makes phone calls to the mother company behind all of this. It's actually amusing to watch, because Meryl plays two characters in this movie. So while on the call playing Ellen, she's talking to herself in a different costume on the other side of the conversation. Anyhow, Ellen gets no answers, which she is used to at this point.

There are other stories that portray those at the top, but ultimately, the one that really matters is Ellen's, because it's one that we are all able to most closely identify with. Her story is easiest to understand because she's a distraught widow with not much else to do, and so she works to put the pieces together. In this story, Ellen Martin is the meek, and in money laundering schemes like these, it's the meek who are most affected by it, but don't have the authority to do anything about it. She spends many nights awake and loses her appetite until April of 2016 when what is known today as "The Panama Papers" are leaked to the public by a source identified as John Doe. John Doe is represented in the movie by Meryl's second character. The supreme business men who are the masterminds behind the money laundering and deceit are sent to jail by the film's end, but only for three months.

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This movie is all about tax evasion, dishonesty, and money. What it boils down to is that when things don't add up, all you have to do is follow the money. The film had a lot going on, but with a plot like this there's a lot to cover because there's a lot of people involved. Watching the movie is about as difficult to keep track of things as it would be if you were in the movie, so I guess the film delivered its message. It's a shame really, the things people are able to get away with depending on their status position. Sometimes they only pay 750 dollars in U.S. taxes.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.