Capitalism: A Love Story

If Michael Moore's latest film really is a love story, then it's a tale told by the jilted lover. It's angry and outsized, passionate and one-sided, and in the end more emotionally persuasive than intellectually so. Like the broken-hearted everywhere, Moore feels compelled to tell his version of things, and desperately wants us to see it his way. Lucky for us, his tunnel vision doesn't rob him of his sense of humor.

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY is Moore's account of the recent near-collapse of the country's financial sector. He's outraged by last year's 700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street and infuriated that working stiffs have to bear the burden of the fat cats' mistakes. A longtime bugaboo of the Right, Moore is relatively bipartisan in his attacks this time out. It's true he places the initial blame for the economic unravelling at the feet of the Reagan administration, and George W. Bush is the butt of a number of obvious jokes, but Moore is equally scathing of high-profile Democrats, especially Senator Chris Dodd. And he really skewers the Obama administration's Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner.

But that shouldn't really surprise us. Moore has always been more of a populist than a party man. As a result, he spends a lot of time in the film with down-and-out workers from the middle and lower middle classes. We're introduced to families whose longtime homes are being foreclosed on. We meet widows and widowers whose spouses earned their employers millions of dollars thanks to something called "dead peasant" insurance policies. (And of course, none of that money saw its way to the grieving spouses.) Moore also takes us to a factory whose workers barricade themselves inside after they're told they won't get their paychecks due to bankruptcy. These segments are designed to work on an emotional level and for the most part they do. But because they're so anecdotal in nature, they don't really persuade us of anything beyond the personal toll hard times have on people.

Moore really does have an argument he wants to make, and a rather daring one at that. He's convinced that capitalism does more harm than good; that's it's a fundamentally flawed system which rewards personal greed at the expense of the welfare of others and results in highly unequal and unfair distributions of wealth. He argues that the American public has been sold a bill of goods: that capitalism is next to godliness. If anything, it's the opposite, he says. It's for that reason Moore wants us to end our emotional attachment to capitalism. In other words, it's time to break off the engagement.

He's especially furious that our country's top bankers have so much influence in the government. At one point, there were so many Goldman Sachs bigwigs dictating financial policy, the White House was dubbed "Government Goldman." Moore reaches his own personal boiling point with Congress' approval of the 700 billion dollar bailout of the banks. He complains that by spending a few million dollars to sway Congress, the banks earned billions of free money. And since he's convinced the American public was dead set against the bail-out, he sees the vote as a prime example of capitalism co-opting democracy.

One problem here is that Moore never lets anyone try to explain why the bailout might have been a good idea. He's so convinced that anyone in support of it must be corrupt that he doesn't allow for any honest disagreement. (Doesn't he remember Debate 101 - that acknowleging an opponent's argument and then countering it is a far more effective strategy than ignoring it.)

But Moore may feel that he simply doesn't have enough time to debate the issue. He's in too much of a hurry to get HIS point across to worry about being fair to the other side. Which brings us to the strength of Michael Moore. He may not provide a fair and balanced approach to his always timely topics (health care, gun control, the Iraq War, etc) but he has an entertainer's flair ... for the dramatic and especially for the comic. It's that latter quality that keeps Moore among the top-drawing documentarians of all time.

CAPITALISM gets off to a clever start with a 1950's era theatre warning that what you are about to see is not for the faint of heart. Moore also gets a lot of comic mileage out of re-dubbing Zeffirelli's JESUS OF NAZARETH so that the Messiah spouts off bogus financial advice and advises Lazarus he can't raise him up since he has a "pre-existing condition." The laughs keep coming when a series of financial experts are unable to explain what "derivatives" are. (It's like a Jay Leno Jaywalking skit for the CNBC crowd.) And of course, we have the trademark Michael Moore stunts as well. First, he drives a Brinks armored car up to the headquarters of each of the major banks who received bail-out money and demands the money be returned .. to him. And then, for the movie's climax, Moore literally wraps the AIG building in yellow crime scene tape. As we're laughing at the sheer audacity and absurdity of it all, he hits us with his rather heavy (and yes, heavy-handed) message: Capitalism is evil!

What saves this jeremiad from being more than just a screed against capitalism is that Moore keeps his sense of humor intact and perhaps even more importantly, he finds a new and better love and she goes by the name of Democracy. Let the honeymoon begin.