Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

Stars: Michael Moore

Director: Michael Moore

Plugs: None

The United States is in the midst of one of the worst economic times since the Great Depression (which by all accounts was not all that great). Unemployment and home foreclosures are up, taxpayers are on the hook for a trillion dollars or more, and hardworking middle class folks got screwed while big corporations and the wealthiest 1% got richer.

Why did this happen? It is a valid and important question, and filmmaker Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11) is more than happy to express his views and outrage in his new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story.

One criticism of Moore’s work is that it oversimplifies things. While this is true, all documentaries necessarily and by definition simplify the world. Any documentary must have focus, and the very act of picking what to focus on, who to interview and what to show, is an act of bias, of emphasizing one point of view over another. There’s nothing wrong with this, though in some ways Moore seems to be tilting at windmills. Of course there have been (and continue to be) white-collar criminals and financial excesses. Whenever people are motivated by money, some will take advantage of others.

But the problem is not capitalism per se, it’s a lack of regulation and greed. Moore is, of course, not calling for the wholesale dismantling of the capitalist system. After all, he made the film with money from financial investors who want him to be successful and earn enough to pay them back. And theaters selling $10 movie tickets and $8 buckets of popcorn are all about the bottom dollar.

The film asks why many airline pilots enter the workforce at near-poverty wages (blame union-busting and cost-cutting); why many brand-name companies take out clandestine life insurance policies on their employees (thus secretly profiting from their deaths); and what the hell happened to the taxpayers’ $700 billion bank bailout.

You don’t need to agree with Moore’s politics to believe that the government swindled taxpayers in the bailout. In fact, Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, recently concluded that officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve flat-out lied to the public last fall when they claimed that the top nine banks to get bailout money were strong, when in fact they knew the banks were in deep trouble.

Moore even makes a semi-compelling case that religion (and Christianity in particular) is at odds with capitalism, interviewing priests and church leaders who state categorically that Jesus would recognize little of his teachings in today’s version of the free market. (Jimmy Swaggart, Creflo Dollar, Jim Bakker and others were apparently not available to offer another point of view.)

For all his blowhard bluster, sledgehammer politics, and righteous indignation, Moore makes some very good points that cannot be dismissed out of hand. “Socialism” has become a boogeyman word over the past year or so, but as Moore points out, no less a Marxist than Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave an impassioned speech to the American public about a “second Bill of Rights” which would make (among many other things) universal health care a fundamental right for all Americans. Capitalism: A Love Story is unfocused and scattershot. It doesn’t have the political punch of Fahrenheit 9/11 but it does offer some interesting insights and information into how we got in this mess.