At The Movies: Bad Education, The Laundromat and Okja are films for the imposter in us

SINGAPORE - One result of the coronavirus-triggered work-from-home trend is the rise in reports of workers suffering from imposter syndrome.

The reasoning goes like this: At home, I finish my tasks in a fraction of the time it takes at the office. This proves that the point of showing up at work is about looking good for the boss and getting along with co-workers.

If that is how I am being judged, then how good do I really have to be at my job?

Take cold comfort in the black comedy Bad Education (M18, 2019, 105 minutes, showing on HBO and HBO Go from April 26, 4 stars).

Based on a true white-collar crime, it shows that if office life is mostly theatre, then success belongs to those who excel at stagecraft.

The excellent Allison Janney (the biopic I, Tonya, 2017) is cast perfectly as Pam, a school administrator in New York in the early 2000s. Pam oozes professionalism. Her team fear and adore her. She is fiercely loyal to Frank (Hugh Jackman), a charismatic superintendent of schools who has everyone eating out of his hand.

Using their combined powers - he overflows with warmth, she is a lioness protecting everyone who swears loyalty to her - they drag the district's schools up the regional rankings, endear themselves to parents and become impervious to oversight.

Too many comedies built around white-collar villains turn their main characters into caricatures of people who lead double lives: Upstanding citizens by day, coke-snorting beasts by night.

Director Cory Finley and screenwriter Mike Makowsky, relative newcomers to feature film-making, turn Pam and Frank into real humans who let their aspirations get ahead of their salaries.

The other true story likely to plunge you into the depths of imposter syndrome is The Laundromat (M18, 2019, 96 minutes, streaming on Netflix, 3.5 stars).

This star-studded project tries to get its arms around the Panama Papers leak of 2016, an event understood by many to be bad news for elites, but only vaguely grasped in detail because it involves corporate law.

Acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh, working with a screenplay from frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns (the crime biopic The Informant!, 2009; pandemic story Contagion, 2011) has opted for a blend of broad comedy and heartfelt drama, split into loosely-connected episodes.

Each brings home the idea that even the most paranoid of theories about how the game is rigged is probably true: Yes, the Russian mob and Chinese bureaucrats are distorting the prices of homes in your city; yes, your hoped-for insurance payout might never come because someone wrote something on a slip of paper in Central America.

Its bleakness and blunt approach to the facts of tax havens and money laundering caused this film to largely disappear from awards radars, but compelling performances from Meryl Streep and Jeffrey Wright will at least help viewers see one thing: Compared with the sleek, suited and smiling gentlemen who run the international financial system, most of us imposters are amateurs.

South Korean film-maker Bong Joon-ho made history with his social comedy Parasite (2019) but three years ago, he released the much less celebrated satire Okja (NC16, 2017, 121 minutes, streaming on Netflix, 3.5 stars), a film that also touches on Parasite's ideas about the rich-poor divide.

Tilda Swinton stars as the boss of a food corporation with the technology to make both liberals and conservatives happy: She will breed a livestock animal that will get bigger and fatter while eating and excreting less.

Like The Laundromat, the film's scathing message is hidden beneath campy comedy. Too many of the jokes and setups are either misfires or belabour some point about the optics of food production.

But Swinton's corporate boss is something to behold. Her Lucy Mirando is the ultimate imposter and represents how they have taken over the world. She keeps winning because she understands one fact: Given a choice between an easy lie or an uncomfortable fact, the audience will always pick the lie, and reward the liar for it.