In Theaters: Capitalism: A Love Story

After some background on how the capitalist system came to dominate the American economy and many of its social and political bodies over the course of the twentieth century, Moore arrives at a clip of Jimmy "Debbie Downer" Carter scolding his fellow Americans about their conspicuous consumption. He follows that with one of the most beautifully scathing introductions of Ronald Reagan's political ascent ever produced. No one -- not even John Stewart and his beady-eyed crew -- can cull and arrange archival footage like Michael Moore. As a witness to televised history he has no equal; the annals of film, radio, print and secret Citigroup memos aren't much safer. Moore clearly revels in a good "gotcha," and in this film mostly represses the "I told you so" overkill that takes the fun out of such moments for the viewer.

But he did tell us so, as Moore reminds us with footage of his own 1989 film, Roger and Me; it may have taken twenty years, but GM did go bankrupt. Moore states that he has essentially been making Capitalism for those last twenty years, and indeed much of it feels like a personal culmination; the stories of bereft Americans and wicked corporations are interspersed with footage of Moore's boyhood journey to Wall Street and a trip with his father to the GM site where Moore Sr. spent 33 years working--now a barren scrap heap.

Capitalism's sprawling cross-section of our current, socio-economic havoc moves from story to story with vague, sleight-of-hand segues; the film's resultant slickness, and its illusion of cumulative coherence, is actually a product of Moore's signature bait and switch, the same lack of structural integrity that mars most of his films. An early examination of a corrupt juvenile detention system in Pennsylvania leads (in)directly into a discussion of the abysmally low salaries of airline pilots, which is somehow tied to the recent crash in Buffalo, which is linked to employers taking out "Dead Peasant" insurance policies on their employees and then cashing in when those employees die. Only a total goon would deny that these stories are appalling in their own right, but piled together they form a disjointed barrage, not a cohesive argument, and the outrage they enjoin is equally unfocused -- one reason, perhaps, why none of his films have had the mobilizing effect Moore intended.

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