[Editor's Note: Please welcome Michelle Orange, a former Movieline guest film critic turned staff critic today. She'll be contributing two in-depth reviews per week.]
No one makes me want to go back to Canada more than Michael Moore. Not even Bush II, frequent subject of Moore's clammy wrath: Where W. had a (crude, acrid) way with doctrine, some profound, core certainty within -- call it my sanity -- wouldn't let me believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that his brand of horseshit would get over; Moore, meanwhile, crafts his agit-prop with the sort of populist finesse that slides right home.
When Bowling for Columbine came out, for instance, I still lived in Toronto, in the very downtown, Italian neighborhood where Moore went opening people's unlocked doors. Yes, I thought, this is better, this is where I live. Then I moved to New York.
Since then I have watched Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, and now Capitalism: A Love Story, in crowded Manhattan theaters, and despite many misgivings about the films themselves, and an acute awareness of Moore's agenda and skill as a propagandist, I'm certain that each time I left the theater with the look of someone who just ate the whole thing: My God, what have I done?
Both the most defeated and the most hopeful of his recent socio-political indictments, Capitalism is a bumpy, involving ride. It finds Flint's lonely, schlubby man trolling the country for a read on the post-meltdown state of the union. After a glib sequence comparing the United States' recent economic crisis to the fall of Rome, Moore, in full knowing, storybook form, narrates footage from a series of home foreclosures in progress. We get very little context about these homeowners, as Moore goes straight for the killer imagery of "working class," "middle class" and "hard-working" people being removed from their homes. It all seems, of course, like madness.
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.
But then there's no room for self-interrogation when crooked magicians like Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner are on the loose. Capitalism's greatest success is its dismantling of the very sketchy genesis of the federal stimulus package, which is contrasted with an old fashioned worker protest in the heartland. Describing his bafflement at the voodoo economy currently cleaving the country in two, one worker sitting in at the downsized factory crystallizes the issue perfectly: all that fancy talk about derivatives and stimulus has nothing to do with them, he says, they just want to get paid for honest work: "Here we don't make deals, we make doors and windows."
Not anymore we don't, not really. We just make money now, sometimes we make it out of thin air, with one percent of the population controlling an economy that hold the lives of the other ninety-nine in the balance -- an end point Moore suggests capitalism was bound to reach sooner or later. In the process the capitalist ethos has corrupted our social and moral fabric as well, and many of us were swindled all too easily, taking on debts and mortgages well beyond our means; even good, hard-working people made bad decisions.
For the most part Moore ignores this piece of the pie, focusing instead on corporate bogeymen. While complacency is hardly what Moore espouses, depicting 99% of the population as victims confuses the film's ultimate message of individual action and accountability. On the subway ride home from the screening Moore's message -- and his patronizing delivery -- was manifest in the recording piped through the car: as though we, as a nation, had regressed to a point of childlike cluelessness, we were strongly encouraged to forfeit our seats to the elderly, handicapped, and pregnant.
But perhaps we do need to be spoken to like an unruly kindergarten class, and reminded of the obvious, of what we used to know intuitively -- don't buy what you can't afford, stop eating when you're full, rise and fight against what is totally fucked up with your votes and your feet -- until we learn to live as a co-operative society again. What a world, I thought. What a city. "Courtesy is contagious," the calm voice went on, "and it begins with you."