Josh Reviews Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, starts off strong.  The film juxtaposes narration from a movie about the fall of the Roman Empire with images of the United States of America from the last year and a half.  Moore’s point is clear.

It is hardly surprising, for anyone who has ever seen a Michael Moore film before, that Mr. Moore is taking this position.  After movie after movie filled with enormous criticism of the actions of the auto industry, the medical & health insurance industries, and more, Capitalism: A Love Story seems to be the ultimate, logical progression of Mr. Moore’s anger: an attempted condemnation of the overarching system of life here in the U.S.: Capitalism.

So how well does he make his case?

After the terrific opening, I felt the first half of the film floundered somewhat.  Mr. Moore presents several anguishing stories, each of which are certainly tragic and worthy of outrage.  (One vignette that sticks with me is the plight of a group of kids sentenced to lengthy stays in a privately-owned juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, PA, by a judge in the pocket of the owners of that center.) But this first half of the film feels all over the place.  The vignettes are sad, but the connection to Moore’s overall message about the inherent evils of Capitalism seems thin.  (Judges and other important officials have certainly been bribed in non-Capitalist countries…)

There are other flaws with this first half.  Early on we meet several families being evicted from their homes, and we’re clearly meant to feel great sympathy for them.  But we don’t learn more about the circumstances of their evictions until much later in the film.  Without that background, I didn’t find the images of these families to be all that effective — frankly I responded the opposite way, reacting against what I perceived as Moore’s attempt at manipulation of the audience.  Yes, families being kicked out of their homes is a terrible sight.  But until and unless we, the audience, learn the reasons behind their evictions, watching those images unfold did not, for me, help Moore make his point.

Then there is the time spent with actor Wallace Shawn.  I absolutely adore Wallace Shawn (and not just for his most famous role as Vizzini in The Princess Bride), but what the heck do I care what he has to say about the economic situation in America today?  That’s nice that he seems to agree with Mr. Moore, but so what?  I was quite perplexed by the focus on Mr. Shawn in the film’s early-going.  It just added to my sense that the first half of the film was bouncing around aimlessly.

It sort of feels like Mr. Moore was working on a movie and then, once the economic collapse happened last year, he decided to shape his film around that topic — but he didn’t want to lose the material he’d already been working on.  (Having done a good deal of reading about the film after seeing it, it does seem that Moore was hard-at-work on this film before the collapse last year.)  The result is a film that, while extraordinarily powerful at points, loses some of its effectiveness because it seems to lurch constantly from topic to topic.

This is particularly frustrating because, in the second half of the film, once Moore starts directly addressing the recent economic collapse, the film really takes off.  Obviously there is a lot of anger out there about what went down, and rightly so, and Moore is extraordinarily effective at cutting through all of the complicated talk and double-speak to shine a harsh light on the actions of many in the finance industry and our government.  The exchange in which Mr. Moore tries to get an understandable explanation for derivatives out of a pleasant-enough-sounding Wall Street banker is a riot (and makes my stomach clench), as does some frankly shocking exchanges with members of Congress about how little they knew about the bailout they approved.  Some statements by Rep. Marcy Kapur (D-Ohio) are particularly eye-opening.

All of the above is intercut with several of the stunts for which Michael Moore is known for (and which you might have seen in the film’s trailers), such as his arrival at AIG headquarters with an armored car so that he can demand the return of the bailout money, or running yellow crime scene tape around blocks of Wall Street.  These are great moments.  But overall, the film is pretty light on Mr. Moore’s trademark humor.  The man seems clearly frustrated that, after twenty years of making movies (and TV shows such as his fantastic The Angry Truth series) about these types of subjects, these problems seem to have gotten worse rather than better.

Hey, I am too!

While a far cry from his strongest work (which, for me, would be Bowling For Columbine), I still found Capitalism: A Love Story to be a worthwhile (even if at times frustrating and aggravating) film.  Agree with him or disagree with him, Mr. Moore is unafraid to look head-on at the many enormous problems facing our nation today.  For that he has my respect, and my attention.