Capitalism: A Love Story is a connect-the-dots expose of the Wall Street players who conspired to invent credit default swaps and then used them to conduct a cruel financial war against regular people like you and me. It’s an engaging if uneven piece of cinematic activism. Think of it as An Inconvenient Truth with Michael Moore in the Al Gore role, Huffington Post not Washington Post, Woody Allen merged with Ralph Nader.
MM is the clown prince of documentary film making and America’s self-appointed social conscience. He’s a provocateur, this fat, goofy-looking guy, a man more wedded to the emotional truth than facts, the left’s Rush Limbaugh.
The film’s title echoes Enemies: A Love Story, director Paul Mazursky’s story about a Holocaust survivor’s doomed struggle to love again after the Nazi horror show. While Capitalism is just as bleak and angry in places as Enemies, as haunted by brutality, it’s also full of humor, compassion and optimism. It is arguably MM’s best film to date.
There’s a kind of murder mystery at the heart of Capitalism, an almost gleeful dissection of how the economic meltdown happened and who’s to blame. In one Super-Size Me type sequence, pictures of top shelf Goldman Sachs execs are laid out like cards on a Vegas gaming table, circles and arrows showing how these folks got each other rich at taxpayer expense. The facts are not new but laughing about the absurdity of the situation is.
Like The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s pioneering documentary, Capitalism keeps drilling down into the bedrock of things. Morris’s film actually helped to free an innocent man sent to death row for a murder he did not commit. Moore’s film will probably not trundle any more Bernie Madoff’s off to jail but, then again, President Obama has already told us to just move on.
By my count, capitalism is defined as an “evil” half a dozen times in the movie, including twice by different priests and once by a bishop, authorities on the subject. Moore himself uses the word “revolution” at least three times during the film, although it’s not clear if he invokes Lenin or the Beatles. Either way, his goal is to foment political action and he uses many different tactics to get the job done.
The Merry Prankster routines were my personal favorite, Yippie-like stunts worthy of ‘60’s anti-Wall Street activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. LOL stuff like wrapping the perimeter of AIG’s headquarters in crime scene tape. Or showing up with a big canvas bag at Bank of America, all innocent and cuddly, come to take our taxpayer bailout money back.
MM works hard to humanize the stats we hear about foreclosures and unemployment by interviewing people suffering the consequences of the financial meltdown. Much of this takes place in Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan, one of GM’s many former factory towns. This community had already been devastated before the meltdown back when the plant closed, the American Dream baited and switched. There are some touching scenes with MM and his father surveying the elder Moore’s former worksite, now a pitted, featureless place with all traces of the factory, its workers and Main Street unfathomably and irretrievably gone.
In one of the film’s most remarkable moments, we see a disabled worker and his family being evicted from their home. Like millions of others, they gullibly gobbled up a variable mortgage thinking it was a bargain and ended up drowning in rising payments. Dead broke, no place to go, the man says he understands how people could get a gun and go postal. But, he adds quickly, it won’t be me. In other words, he’s mad as hell but willing to take it some more. Other interviewees echo his bewildered, neutered anger. And so, sad to say, do most of us. Does anyone really know what to do next? Does our government? Does the free market?
Well, Michael Moore does. For him capitalism is a monster on the once shining hill of American democracy, and it’s gotta go before it kills us and the planet earth. Sure, the message is hyperbolic and the messenger suspect, but so is a $700 billion bailout of the financial elite that created the meltdown in the first place. One thing seems clear: our nation’s financial crisis is part of a much more serious default in our democratic system of checks and balances. Capitalism is a contemporary version of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, rousing us citizens from our political slumber to fight for our rights and America’s health and moral integrity. We push the snooze bar at our peril.
NOTE: If this subject interests you but MM does not, I have heard good things about (but not seen) a more traditional documentary, American Casino.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I have not seen MM's film yet, but your review certainly whets my appetite to see it. Based on your review and others about this film that I have seen, too much of the film is about Moore himself, but the topic is too important to be dismissed. You pose some very good questions, the most provocative of which is why we are all so passive in the face of an onslaught that has left 1 in 10 workers unemployed, resulted in millions of dispossessed homeowners (albeit some who certainly knew that they lacked the means to become homeowners in the first place), and has created a class of undeserving millionaires who create nothing but fully believe that they are worth every penny of their ill-gotten gains. Our country's "leaders" in Congress and the White House are creatures of the system, have benefited from it, and few among them question it, much less seek to reform it. We seem to be riding this ship into a storm that may break it apart, yet we are given bread and circuses to keep us amused, and those "in charge" either think things are fine or engage in the window-dressing of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We are in deep trouble.
I'm looking forward to seeing this movie. But I don't think I would call MM a leftist Rush. MM seeks the truth, Rush simply wants to bury it. Am I prejudiced?
Post a Comment