A turbulent attempt to turn a 2003 jumbo bestseller of pop socio-economics into a pot-stirring documentary, Freakonomics features six great directors and one unhelpfully vague theme: Exposing "the hidden side of everything." That's the kind of subhead that looks great on mass-market book covers, but Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's wide-ranging, anecdotal approach to the difference between correlation and causality has lost some of its cumulative mojo in translation, partly because after seven years the pot is pretty well stirred, and partly because the medium demands narrative focus.
Despite chaptering the documentary into four discrete segments (each separately helmed and stylistically distinct) and providing introductory interstitials (directed by Seth Gordon, of The King of Kong), the dominant and most persuasive theme of Freakonomics is probably promotion of the brand. Instead of being the Paris Je T'Aime of documentaries (and that film's producer, Chad Troutwine, was indeed the mastermind here), the film, at its worst, plays like the slickest, most pedigreed extended book trailer a publisher could hope for. As it happens, branding is the heart of the first chapter, "A Roshanda By Any Other Name," directed by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me). After being introduced to the authors via a disorienting anecdote about the dubiously aligned interests of real estate agents and their clients, Spurlock takes the reins, using canned skits, cannily chosen street interviews, and animation to explore the theory that a name can determine your destiny.
The story of a black child accidentally named "Temptress" (instead of Tempestt, like the Cosby Show actress) who grew up to get into all kinds of temptation-based trouble is the starting point for a fascinating but crudely executed look at class and cultural developments in the most literal manifestation of identity we have. Strippers walk around with their stripper names branded across their bare breasts as Spurlock wags about how the formerly popular middle class name Ashley trickled down to the "Wal-Mart set" and became "low-rent Trashley." Self-control is obviously not in the Spurlock repertoire, and yet here its lack highlights one of the problems of translating Dubner and Levitt into a visual medium: Spurlock uses images of grooving "ghetto fabulous" girls to illustrate the 220 spellings of "Unique" that have been documented as names for black girls. It's a glib conceptualization that does a disservice to the material but also leaves its casual ethnography uncomfortably exposed.
National, cultural, and institutional identities are one focus of Alex Gibney's chapter, "Pure Corruption." Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) takes a moody, atmospheric look at cheating in Japanese sumo wrestling, a practice that flourished, it is argued, precisely because sumo is considered a sacred extension of Shinto beliefs. No one wanted to believe such a thing was possible, and that denial allowed the scandal to continue, leading to violent cover-ups. Things get a little soupy when Gibney attempts to analogize the sumo scenario with the United States' financial collapse: Did pre-2008 America really view financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan as paragons of unquestionable purity? No doubt a collective pathology and mass denial was involved, but I suspect both were rooted in widespread greed and self-interest of variable gradations.
Least successful is Eugene Jarecki's entry, "It's Not Always a Wonderful Life," a largely animated and yet dully summative segment narrated by Melvin Van Peebles. Animation, charty graphics, and archival news footage illustrate Levitt's most controversial theory. When the crime wave predicted to overwhelm the country in the 1990's didn't happen, mayors and news outlets offered a number of explanations -- including "innovative policing" (shudder) and the decrease in crack habits. Unconvinced, Levitt looked to history and the numbers, deciding that a more plausible explanation might be that the passing of Roe V. Wade in 1973 meant that there was a cohort of unwanted (and therefore potentially criminal) children who failed to materialize. Mention is made of Romania, where abortion was outlawed in 1966, ostensibly to raise the failing birth rate, and the crime that overran that country, as if destitution and a murderous dictator had nothing to do with it. Levitt, who appears in each segment, persists in reminding us that he is an economist (as if the pleated Dockers weren't a dead giveaway), and in this case adds to that the apolitical messenger defense. But squeezing his theory into a 20-minute capsule does its logistical gaps and inflammatory leaps of logic no favors.
Best in show is the final chapter, by Jesus Camp directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. "Can A Ninth Grader Be Bribed To Succeed?" is as straightforward a title as the others are oblique, and rather than retreading Levitt's theories, the duo decided to test one of them out on their own. They follow two Chicago ninth graders with crappy grades and little educational motivation. The kids have been told that they can make cold hard cash if they get their grades up; both are intrigued but only one follows through. The class issues are a little head-spinning, as is the untroubled rationale of incentives as a social good: Romanian women, for instance, were also given incentives to have at least five kids; not all unwanted children are the product of anti-abortion laws.
The idea, alluded to by one of the charismatic young subjects, is to hook kids on phonics by first speaking to them in a language they can understand: stretch limos. The experiment -- along with the way privileged folks (like those conducting the study here, or directing any of the recent spate of education reform docs) seem to weep with relief whenever an inner-city kid pulls a B -- captures the larger desperation surrounding the issue of education in this country: Just get it done whatever way you can.