Autumn is upon us, and with it the long, often tedious publicity trail to the Oscars. The late-summer film festivals, from Venice through to London, have had their say, while nomination lists for some of the season’s earliest precursor prizes are being compiled. For Netflix, this now means the rollout of their shiniest awards hopefuls on a near-weekly basis: Martin Scorsese’s mob epic The Irishman and Mati Diop’s Cannes sensation Atlantics are among the streaming service’s November attractions.
This month, however, they’re kicking off with two of their lighter prestige offerings. Fresh from the Venice fest, Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat has been available to stream since Friday, while blaxploitation biopic Dolemite Is My Name, which prompted murmurs of Oscar buzz at Toronto for its star, Eddie Murphy, goes up on the platform on Friday. I have a hard time imagining either film scooping huge amounts of golden hardware in the next few months, but as springy, couch-based entertainment, both have a lot to offer.
Back in February, I wrote about how Soderbergh’s spiky, iPhone-shot sports-business drama High Flying Bird announced him as pretty much the ideal Netflix auteur, given his long-standing resistance to big-screen tradition and his embrace of newer, scrappier film-making technologies. The Laundromat is a bigger production than that one, and a more old-school one too, with its unfussy film-making serving to flatter showy star turns from Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman. That makes it less interesting and less dynamic than Soderbergh’s Netflix debut, albeit easier to watch with a drink on a Friday night.
There’s a modicum of substance here, as the film essentially works as a breezy introduction to the 2016 Panama Papers scandal, filtering that complex tangle of offshore financial chaos through the smaller story of Ellen Martin (Streep), a dithery, bucket-hatted pensioner pulling away at a seemingly minor insurance-fraud case – a thread that turns out to unravel the entire bobbly jumper.
Streep, who can score Oscar nominations merely for breathing within earshot of a camera, is on broad, sprightly form. She’s not especially tested here, but she makes The Laundromat a romp, and gives it a softer, sweeter heart than otherwise comparable economic crisis films such as The Big Short. Back around the time of Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh gave procedurals like this righteous cinematic welly; here, he has practically accepted that he’s making a TV movie. It feels more at home in my living room than it did in a grand Venice screening hall.
Dolemite Is My Name is similarly sparky without being especially ambitious, ticking off as it does a shopping list of showbiz biopic conventions in the story of Rudy Ray Moore. A failing African American comedian, Moore reversed his fortunes in the 1970s by adopting the persona of the obscene, motormouthed street pimp Dolemite, becoming an icon of blaxploitation cinema in the process – a clear inspiration to Eddie Murphy, who plays him with plainly adoring dedication, deftly channelling Moore’s ribald comic energy through his own wild screen presence.
Murphy never got talked up for awards when he was doing his own thing in comedy; it’s only when he’s pouring his spirit into a different kind of black performer, as in his Oscar-nominated turn as a self-destructive soul singer in Dreamgirls, that he suddenly gets that kind of respect. Which is to say that, electric as he often is in Dolemite Is My Name – a funny, fluorescently styled exercise that dotes generously on its star at some cost to its own cinematic inventiveness – it’d be nice to see a film, half as carefully and devotedly made as this one, that just lets Eddie Murphy be Eddie Murphy. Can his own Netflix biopic be far off?
Also new to streaming and DVD
Support the Girls
(Bulldog Films, 15)
A wonderfully weathered performance by Regina Hall anchors Andrew Bujalski’s observant, warmly communal comedy about the put-upon female staff of a Hooters-style “breastaurant”.
Transit
(Curzon Artificial Eye, 15)
German auteur Christian Petzold takes a bold conceptual risk with this modern-dress adaptation of Anna Seghers’s 1944 Holocaust novel, powerfully transposing its concerns of identity and impermanence to the current refugee crisis.
Toy Story 4
(Disney, U)
If you thought Toy Story 3 brought the story to a neat and meaningful close, rendering any further sequels superfluous, you’d be right. This is bright and cheery enough, and made a billion dollars worldwide, but that’s the reason it exists.
