Boy meets ideology, boy loses shirt--Capitalism: A Love Story
Written: Oct 14 '09 (Updated Nov 02 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Funny, inspiring, infuriating.
Cons: Hodge podge, Moore seems a bit tired.
The Bottom Line: Not the most coherent movie I've ever seen, but worthwhile anyway.
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| factotum's Full Review: Capitalism: A Love Story |
Capitalism: A Love Story is far from a bad film. Michael Moore finds two hours worth of stories to alternately inspire, anger, amuse and touch his liberal audience (and mostly just anger his conservative critics). He and his filmmaking team do a good job mixing archival footage with their own original reportage, and the best of the latter puts the mainstream media to shame. It was worth my money and time to go see, as far as that goes. But the movie is fundamentally flawed nonetheless.
Capitalism never quite comes together as a motion picture. Whereas Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, and Fahrenheit 9/11 honed in on their targets authoritatively, this film seems much less focused. Moore offers a series of vignettes, the best of which are quite powerful. There's the story of the factory workers who are let go when the bank buys the company they work for; we follow their struggle to get the bank to pay them the wages they were owed when the manufacturer and cheer when they force them to make good on the debts they inherited. We see a family forced off the property they have owned for generations, then given the further indignity of being paid to clean the vacant property for the next owners. In a particularly affecting passage, Moore takes his father to the recently demolished site of the GM plant in Flint, MI where he worked his whole adult life.
So far, so good. But there's filler, too. Clips from vaults and even You Tube, some of which are entertaining, others of which are illuminating, but more than a few of them seem to take up time more than they advance the radical filmmaker's thesis. Moore's attempts at guerrilla theater are a mixed bag as well. Cordoning off the offices of the Wall Street firms that profited from the bailout with police tape is an inspired jape, but Moore seems tired this time as he makes an attempt to get into the offices of General Motors.
Moore as much as admits that he's burned out in the closing narration to Capitalism. He expresses a frustration that he can only do so much with films and that the audience needs to get politically involved. Doubtless this film will cajole some into action. It is not without some potency. It's just that it feels more like a record with a handful of really good songs--even one or two great ones--but balanced out by more ordinary material than it does a great album where even the least numbers serve toward the arc of the work as a whole. If it does indeed turn out to be Moore's last film, though, it was a good run and Capitalism wouldn't the worst coda to it.
Recommended:
Yes
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factotum
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Member: Edward Kane
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