One thing we know about Michael Moore; he enjoys the role of provocateur. He’s played the part in a handful of popular documentaries and TV shows over the past 20 years, tweaking noses in the auto industry, the gun lobby, the insurance industry, and the military industrial complex. He has no reservations about tackling large issues, or skewering those who choose not to cooperate with his impromptu interviews. But this time out he’s taken on a whopper; the entire free enterprise system.
A couple weeks ago Steven Soderbergh directed a fair amount of vituperative energy against executives at the Archer Daniels Midland Company, in “The Informant!” That movie spent most of two hours covering the corporate indiscretions of a huge company, the executives largely responsible, and a little about its effects on the larger society. Moore has attempted to narrate the history of all Capitalism and assay its shortcomings in about the same running time.
He starts with a montage of campy scenes from trashy horror movies, the message of which is that what we are about to see is going to be pretty scary. He tells us about growing up in Flint Michigan, where his father put in a long, productive career working for General Motors. He declares that things were good in those days. But as overseas competition came to impact the industry, and honest work was trumped by naked greed, Flint deteriorated. Short sighted executives took their money and ran, more or less stranding masses of American workers in substandard, poor paying service jobs. And those were the lucky ones.
The young Moore we see in the early episodes liked Capitalism. But as he matured he grew to see that it was grievously flawed. And he didn’t need a college education to see it for the sham that it is. He’s a little like the writer Robert Fulghum who said that everything he needed to know he learned in kindergarten. Except that Moore expects us to take his word on some pretty complicated issues.
After a thumbnail history that tries to cover the rest of American industry Moore moves on to a brief summation of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He wants us to understand that Reagan was the president largely responsible for the decline of the middle class, moreover, that the legislation he initiated ran contrary to the ideals of democracy. He bookends this with a handful of truly disturbing vignettes showing middle class people losing their homes, and pretty much everything else that sustained them. He adds to that testimonies of several Catholic priests, (Moore was raised Catholic and seems to have a strong empathy for the church) who inform us that capitalism is “evil.”
Some of this is truly shocking. There’s an extended episode covering something called “dead peasant insurance.” Basically companies take out life insurance on young, mid level employees. If and when they die, the companies collect. The spouse and family receive nothing. Wal-Mart, which is identified as principal offender in this disgraceful enterprise, has now abandoned it. Did Moore’s reporting have anything do with that? He doesn’t say. Nor does he say who else might have taken the company to task for it.
The “dead peasant” sequence could have been extended into an entire film, but like a lot of what’s shown in “Capitalism,” it comes bundled with slices of lots of other data, sort of like the subprime mortgages that have proven so troublesome for our economy. These many anecdotes are meant to make the case that the American way of business has killed off democracy.
There’s plenty to get angry about. Especially if you’re willing to take Moore’s accounts at face value. But wait a minute, the Reagan he disdains was elected by very large majorities, twice. The Republican reign that he decries was popular with the vast majority of working people. Moore has little to say about that.
In later sequences he juxtaposes the indifference of a handful of multi-millionaire bankers on the desperation of factory workers who have just lost their jobs. Finally he goes out to make citizens arrests of banking executives who refuse to return the billions in bailout funds they got during the tail end of the Bush administration. Street theater is one of Moore’s specialties, and here he’s got plenty to work with.
A lot of this is deeply disturbing. Some of it is mordantly funny. But most of it is marshaled toward a simple minded mantra that’s repeated to the point of exhaustion: Capitalism is the enemy of Democracy. Democracy has been bushwhacked by an aggressive business ethic that has allowed a very small number to rise above the rest of us.
But he never talks about how we, the people who chose to vote or not, (since more than half of us stay home on election day,) had any say in our own fates.
I’m not interested in arguing the issues Moore throws around. I’m complaining here about the quality of his arguments, and the ultimate power of his movie. And for my taste the importance of his discussion is diminished by an overlay of smug superiority. “Capitalism” isn’t an inquiry, it’s a rant.
Other films in the Moore canon, “Bowling For Columbine,” (about the American romance with weapons,) “Sicko,” (the shortcomings of our healthcare system,) and “ Farhenheit 9/11,” (how we were railroaded into the Iraq war) seemed better focused. Yes, they were overly ambitious, and inclined toward the scattershot. Moore, at his best, is a hit and run artist. But here, more than in the past , Moore fires so wildly he often undercuts the power of his best examples.
“Capitalism—A Love Story,” runs close to two hours. It’s absorbing and passionate. But it shows that, among the many resources in Michael Moore’s tool box, the one he has the least use for is discipline.
