Radical Evil? Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” (FILM REVIEW)
As you might guess, Michael Moore’s new film “Capitalism: A Love Story” is neither a study in “capitalism” nor “a love story.” Instead, Moore’s edgy movie chronicles the collapse of the middle class “American Dream” at the hands of a corrupt corporately-dominated financial, economic, and political system that, he contends, steals from the many to enrich the few.
“Capitalism: A Love Story” feels like two films in one. The film opens in typical Moore agitprop fashion – a series of jerkily-filmed security camera shots of seemingly random bank robberies intercut with the “dog eat dog” opening credits, followed by a didactic Encyclopedia Britannica voiceover of the excesses of the Roman Empire, montage’d with classical celluloid Hollywood fantasy and images of Moore’s favorite villains – George W, Emperor Cheney, and so on.
From there, Moore launches into what has become now-standard fare: MM’s ominous narration accompanied by creatively-interpreted selective moments from late 20th century politics – Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but downer malaise speech, and Ronald Ray-Gun’s sellout of Main Street to Wall Street (as personified by Merrill Lynch bogeyman Don “speed it up” Regan) – “we’re gonna turn the bull loose,” states Reagan. Mr. “Morning in America,” Moore concludes, unleashed the corporate dogs of privatization at the expense of the public good. Moore’s scattershot, almost random approach here is boring – we’ve seen all of this before, and if he intended his narrative to be a focused critique of capitalism, his slings and arrows miss their mark.
From there, Moore gets personal, segueing into a case study of his home town of Flint, Michigan as a microcosm representing the decay of U.S. industrial might. General Motors, a greedy corporate behemoth that placed profit ahead of workers’ needs and innovation, is an old trope for Moore – see his 1989 film “Roger and Me.” To be sure, his interviews with displaced workers are moving. “We put ourselves above and beyond for our republic,” says one tearful auto worker, “and our republic does nothing for us.” But again, what is missing is the bigger picture.
Things get more interesting in hour #2, when Moore focuses on the financial collapse and so-called “bailout,” which is a REAL story that deserves sustained scrutiny, a tale that cries out for Moore’s genius for confrontation. Here again, though, things fall flat. True, Moore does commandeer a Brinks armored vehicle and drive it to Goldman Sachs headquarters to demand our money back, and he does encircle Wall Street banks with crime scene tape. Yet, even these gags fail to set the film on fire, in part because Moore is a lone actor here, unlike his other films, where he finds collaborators. (Think of “Sicko’s” underinsured American workers in a speedboat off the coast of Cuba requesting access to health care, or the paralyzed “Bowling For Columbine” kid in the wheelchair in Wal-Mart’s corporate lobby, asking for justice in the wake of the retail giant’s sale of bullets to two high school assassins.)
Moore is at his most brilliant when he exposes the vagaries of the financial scams and swindles that have swept up and over us all. Watch him skewer slick brokers by capturing them on camera trying to explain “derivatives” – “complex betting schemes” driven by the “insane casino” called Wall Street. See him interview frustrated and courageous Congressional representatives – Ohio’s Marcy Kaptor is particularly heroic – who admit on camera that corporate financiers colluded with federal officials to engineer the national financial “collapse” to enrich their own bottom lines. Some may snort when Moore’s film suggests that Goldman-Sachs is now running the U.S. economy. But, Moore says, simply connect the dots and listen to the voices of people who were there and watched it happen. “Is this the United States Congress,” enraged Congressman Dennis Kucinich asks at one point in the film, “or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?”
Good question. And I think we know the answer.
The biggest disappointment of the film is how little ire Moore directs at Barack Obama, a Bill Clinton-esque corporate-friendly Wall-Street-loving silver-tongued incrementalist if ever there was one. Instead, after drubbing financial “experts” Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in the film’s first hour, Moore sets up Obama to be the agent of “hope” and “change,” complete with weeping and relieved American voters on election day, without so much as a simple nod to the fact that Geithner, Summers, and the rest of their ilk now comprise Obama’s inner economic circle of advisors. Hello? Did Moore somehow miss this inconvenient truth in the editing room?
Some may consider Moore’s eye for the tragicomedy that is the collapsing U.S. economy worth the price of admission, though the story – angry, cruel, depressing – is not pleasant. More to the point – instead of just comically alluding to the Roman Empire at film’s begin, Moore might have alerted us to the fact that the United States is, IN FACT, no longer a governable republic, in which citizens have even a nominal voice in political and economic decision-making, but an out-of-control Empire, in which multinationals buy politicians on both sides of the “Republicrat” aisle to aggressively push their for-profit uber alles policies of privatization. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens – auto workers (of course), airline pilots (paid very poorly), and other worn out “peasants” – struggle to make ends meet and hold their underpaid, overworked, indebted lives together. At the end of the day, what is missing from Moore’s analysis, such as it is, is a nuanced look at some of the more egregious dilemmas in front of us: Peak Oil, imperial Collapse, the “tapeworm economy,” our broken electoral system – and how these converging crises are already shaping our common future.
