Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/5/09
**POLITICAL OPINION WARNING:
if you're one of those people inclined to write letters to editors demanding
that their critic “Just review the movie” rather than offer political opinions,
read no further. Michael Moore's documentaries are political Rorschach
Tests, and barely even exist outside the personal biases of those viewing
them.**
There's a good reason why,
every time you turn on a news program of any kind, you are relentlessly
assaulted by talking heads hitting their talking points hard. If
they persuade you, that's great, but an equally important goal is to create
a sense that “everybody's saying...” whatever it is they're selling.
And if you don't agree, to plant a niggling voice in the back of your head
cautioning you against expressing your opposing view in public, lest “everybody”
look down on your for holding it. For instance, one struggles in
vain to find an unqualified fan of filmmaker Michael Moore. His movies
are great, most critics will tell you, but, you know, he's Michael Moore.
There's no question that, in public, the Oscar-winning director is often
his own worst enemy for precisely the same reason his movies work so well:
a near supernatural level of self-confidence and righteous indignation
over the unholy deeds of Big Business and its' political allies.
And his opponents, often the spokespeople for Big Business and its' political
allies, have a field day making it seem wrong somehow to back this crazy
fat guy in his crusade. Funny thing is, while his new film Capitalism:
A Love Story, packs a punch, it also demonstrates that past successes
like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko were not
the mad, impassioned wails against injustice that they seemed. Because
while those films carefully laid out their cases and pushed the buttons
of moral outrage with a surgeon's precision, Capitalism is mad,
impassioned, and does a whole lot of wailing. When it works, which
is often, it's devastating in its' audacity and implications. When
it doesn't, it exposes the 2009 edition of Michael Moore as a really old
college student growing increasingly exhausted that the whole world doesn't
agree with him yet.
Capitalism, Michael Moore
informs us, sucks. We watch footage of Baby Boomers being indoctrinated
in its' moral superiority while he explains how many of the Global Market
forces that allowed the US to thrive in the 50's and 60's were the simple
result of our competitors having been smashed into rubble by World War
II. Still, dreams of home-ownership and relentless consumption gripped
each successive American generation until Big Business finally got a spokesmodel
into the White House. Ronald Reagan, Moore believes, presided over
a deliberate shift from growing wages and job security to an economy designed
to secure the supremacy of monopolies and to allow Wall Street to print
its' own money directly out of the pockets of the Working Man. The
result: foreclosures, unemployment, a Bailout package that was nothing
but a 700 billion-dollar fraud, and a Citibank memo informing shareholders
that the United States was now a “Plutonomy” where the Top 1% rule over
the rest. It cautioned that the only thing that could possibly stop
the good times from rolling for that top 1% is if the other 99% decided
to turn on them with their ballots... and anything else they can get their
hands on. Who's the man to lead such a revolt? Michael Moore
nominates himself.
The biggest problem with
Capitalism: A Love Story is that in its' rage over the “money
first” sensibility that shapes our national policies, it becomes obsessed
with the notion that Capitalism is Evil and must be destroyed. Yet,
the movie keeps tripping over its' own Freshman Dorm worldview because
it knows none of its' potential views (and certainly not Moore itself)
wants to live in a world where no one can “get ahead”. Actor Wallace
Shawn somehow gets appointed as the film's official economic philosopher
(no offense to Shawn, who seems like a reasonable guy and makes some good
arguments, but how many people must have hang up on Moore before he reached
the voice of Rex the Plastic Dinosaur on his list of noted economists?),
and makes good points about the way pure Capitalism has been undercut by
monopolistic practices that prevent the customer from voting with his purchase.
But that only means that Monopolies are bad for Capitalism, and when Moore
rejects regulation by asking “how can you regulate Evil?” you know this
is gonna be a pretty short conversation.
But the fact that the filmmaker
has drawn wrong-headed conclusions about what his evidence adds up to doesn't
mean that evidence isn't damning, and he remains the Master of the Human
Interest Outrage. We watch heartbroken families who “tapped the equity
in their homes” lose them when the banks come calling, and cities like
Detroit and Cleveland threaten to wither and die under massive waves of
foreclosure. We learn about “Dead Peasant” Life Insurance policies
large corporations take out on their unknowing employees to profit by their
deaths. We watch heroic pilot Chesley Sullenberger testify before
Congress on the deplorable salaries paid to airline pilots. And we
hear the sickening story of two Wilkes-Barre, PA judges (Mark Ciavarella
and Michael Conahan) who took bribes to sentence innocent youths to a private
juvenile facility that needed to keep its' beds filled. That there
are people on death row for drug offenses and these guys “face over seven
years in prison” tells you all about who writes the criminal code.
If you don't want to stop
at outrage and instead want to go straight to hopelessness, Moore's also
got plenty of reason to believe the country has been totally conquered
by its' banks, and gets the 30th ranking member of the House of Representatives
(Marcy Kaptur) to describe deception and influence peddling in last year's
bank bailout scheme that she likens to an economic coup d'etat. He
lays out an argument you're not going to hear in the mainstream media:
that the entire basis of the Bailout (that the economy would fail and slide
into a second Great Depression without one) was a hoax designed to siphon
off taxpayer money into the banks that “really” run the country.
That would seem crazy and paranoid except for the fact that nobody actually
kept track of what was being done with that money and Congress did its'
level best to keep any accountability or limits on what it could be used
for out of the bill. I'm just sayin'.
As you can probably tell,
this isn't one of Moore's funnier movies, although he certainly knows how
to present an argument with the clarity and finesse of a right hook to
the jaw. Asking “Would Jesus be a Capitalist?” he dubs footage from
King of Kings to show Christ offering investment advice or refusing
to heal a man with a pre-existing condition. Advantage Moore.
We hear from several Men of the Cloth about the evils of the Big C and,
consistent with his more serious tone, Moore himself professes his own
Catholic faith and how it informs his opinions in a way he never has before.
There is, of course, something
a tad disingenuous about the son of an auto worker who became a wealthy
filmmaker lecturing us on how Capitalism is a conspiracy designed to keep
the Common Man down. Yes, I did feel sorry for the sad folks we watch
unable to comprehend the market forces that swept them out of their homes,
but Moore is only too happy to let those people off the hook for their
own part in these dramas, having taken out those ill-advised adjustable
rate mortgages in the first place. For that matter, I'd like to see
some evidence that these Victims of Big Capitalism A)vote, and B)do so
in an informed manner. In that spirit, when we see him here, just
a few months later, it's hard to grasp that Joe the Plummer was a real
person, let alone that so many people took his 15 minutes of publicity
stunt fame seriously.
It's a challenge that greets
every pundit when he's successful enough at sticking it to The Man that
his own party finally comes to be in power, and there's no doubt that Moore
works under a Democratic President with a newfound challenge to define
who “They” are. As such, a gives lip service to opposing Democrats
with the same fury as Republicans, hitting Senator Christopher Dodd pretty
hard, but, as always, mostly confining himself to asides mentioning that
“Clinton did that too”. And, of course, Obama cannot yet do any wrong.
Unusual for a Moore movie,
Capitalism errs on the side of despair, but it does offer some solid
examples of what he views as the alternative to Capitalism, although each
of them is striving to compete in the marketplace and make money, which
underscores his shakiness on the term. But you can't beat the story
of the bread factory that splits the profits evenly among all the workers
from CEO down, resulting in a $60,000 salary for them all. And I
LOVED the workers denied their back pay at a closing factory foreclosed
on by Bank of America who refused to vacate until BofA ponied up some of
that bailout money to pay them what they were owed.
The best thing about a Michael
Moore movie is that it gets you thinking and talking about the issues of
the day, and doing so outside the box constructed by a media that tends
to let the major political parties lead them around by the talking points.
Capitalism: A Love Story is no exception. It'll outrage
you, it'll shake you up, it might even make you want to go kick some Capitalist
ass. But it also trades more on emotions and less on ideas than past
Moore films, making it more empty outrage calories than I'd have preferred.
Michael Moore on an off-day still beats most any documentary filmmaker
working today, but when TV pundits whip out their talking points to ask
“If he loves Socialism so much, why doesn't he marry it?” I won't argue
with them. |
