Moore’s Capitalism a Painful Story
Twenty years ago Michael Moore burst upon the documentary scene with his explosive expose on General Motors and Flint, Michigan with Roger & Me. Since then he has tackled everything from guns (Bowling for Columbine), to health care (Sicko) to the Iraq War (Fahrenheit 9/11) while still always making sure to illuminate ills he perceives to be ongoing in corporate America.
Michael Moore stands tall in Overture Films' Capitalism: A Love Story
Still fueled by the same populist anger (and admittedly questionable investigative skills), Moore goes after the corporations like he has never done before, Capitalism: A Love Story a complete evisceration of the American economic system. Mixing personal stories of Midwest families facing eviction, legalistic malfeasance on the part of paid-off judges and Wall Street political pressure leading to an unregulated bailout, the filmmaker has crafted a bristling two hours of information and vitriol, and I don’t care what side of the Red/Blue spectrum a person falls if you can’t find something here to make your blood boil than you’re probably lying in a shallow grave dead.
To say the film works as infuriating entertainment is an understatement. Scenes of Moore roping off Wall Street in crime scene tape are both endearing and effective, while snippets of a family video taping a group of armed police officers breaking into their home in order to evict them are downright chilling. Other moments spending time with Chicago workers engaging in a victorious sit-in against Bank of America are positively euphoric, while shots of a couple Democratic Senators standing on the floor of Congress decrying the speed of the 2008 bailout package produced vigorous applause from the preview audience.
Like all of the filmmaker's pictures his editorializing can be bit bludgeoning whether you agree with his politics or not. You also can’t help but wonder sometimes how he chooses his subjects, the presence of actor and author Wallace Shawn (brought in to ‘explain’ free enterprise) more than a bit puzzling. Some of his leaps in logic are also a bit extreme, while his infatuation with other governments’ financial institutions seems a bit misplaced considering the scope of the recent economic meltdown.
The film works best when Moore allows his interviewees a chance to speak their mind without him cracking wise. There’s an absolutely chilling bit with a widower who inadvertently discovered his wife’s former employer cashed-in on her death by taking out a thing called ‘dead peasant’ insurance upon her. His focus on that 2008 bailout is also positively journalistic, the director taking a relatively straight-forward approach to document the links between Wall Street titans like Goldman Sachs and Capitol Hill and the White House allowing for billions of dollars of legislation to be fast-tracked with very little debate.
While most of his ire is unsurprisingly directed towards the Republicans (most notably the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations) he doesn’t let the Democrats completely off the hook. He points out it was they who the President cleverly used to force through that 2008 legislation while also noting that many of the players instrumental in deregulation were Treasury Department appointees under Bill Clinton.
Moore doesn’t have any answers on how to fix things, the solutions he comes up with sounding a lot like the phony (and most of the time planted) vitriol on display during those testy August town hall meetings. He wants people to rise up like those Chicago workers, take a stand like a Floridian family who broke back into their home after a bank foreclosed upon them.
But Moore doesn’t really take a stand himself, and while his call to action (and to vote) is one I can agree with, and while I found Capitalism: A Love Story to be positively enthralling, I think there needed to be more meat on this film’s bones. Granted, seeing that the director feels the economic corpse has already been stripped clean that might be too much to ask, the last stand against corporate takeover one I get the feeling after watching this he thinks is on the verge failure.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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