Firing a red-hot cannon blast at both parties and the excesses of America’s capitalist system, filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” is also his most stylistically and emotionally mature work to date. Launching with a string of film clips that parallel the fall of the Roman Empire to our present societal hot mess, the film serves up big laughs with its harrowing vision of just how far off the rails our present economic crisis has taken the nation.
Moore has made plenty of claims that “Capitalism” is the summation of two full decades of work, harking back to the 1989 release of his seminal “Roger & Me,” and that this film is lobbing bombs at the figures involved. Yet much of the time, the film has a mournful, yearning approach in showing Moore’s desire that America return to the capitalism of the pre-Jimmy Carter years: he shows that the system’s promises worked out splendidly throughout most of the nation’s history, and in particular from the boom years after WWII all the way through Ford before the nation hit Carter’s infamous assessment of “malaise” in the late ’70s.
He blames Carter’s disastrous turn as president for the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a president who in his eyes was fully bought and paid for by corporate America to sell an aggressively greedy reinvention of capitalism. The allegations he presents in this segment of the film fly past fast and furious, and it appears that Moore is up to the old tricks his critics accuse him of: barraging viewers with so many claims amid other funny or heartbreaking footage that half-truths and heavy-handed interpretations slip by as facts.
Yet this time, Moore takes almost as direct a slap at Barack Obama and the men running his economic policies. In fact, one of the film’s most damning scenes comes when Moore sends one corporate logo after another flying onto the screen, spotlighting the numerous financial investment firms and major corporations that donated millions to Obama’s campaign. His strongest attack comes when he shows that Goldman Sachs – widely criticized as the firm that made off with almost as much malfeasance as individual swindler Bernie Madoff – holds particular sway in the Obama camp.
At another point, a source says that current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is utterly hopeless for the job, and shows that highly questionable figures from the Clinton era, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Harvard president Larry Summers, are still heavily involved in the policies of today. Yet other strong segments show companies that manage to succeed while treating workers exceptionally well, including a bread factory where even assembly-line workers make $60,000 while the company’s bottom line thrives.
Moore is expressly not asking for socialism or communism, but rather a return to letting genuine morality and concern for others play a major part in corporate decision-making.
However, his use of Catholic priests from his stomping grounds in Michigan and the Bishop of Detroit as stern critics of capitalism who term it as literally immoral is sure to spark extensive religious debate among the faithful.
Mixing tragic tales of foreclosed homeowners from the heartland with his usual pranks such as storming corporate headquarters in search of their executives, much of “Capitalism: A Love Story” treads well-worn ground for Moore. But his crack team of editors are sharper than ever with their hilarious contrasts between new footage and industrial films of the 1950s, and combined with Moore’s attacking both sides of the fence and showing of fascinating long-lost footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, make the film well worth seeing and sure to stir discussion no matter what side of the political divide you’re on.
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