Michael Moore takes on his weightiest subject yet with this look at the mortgage crisis, the government bank bailout, and how things in the United States have deteriorated since his first documentary, Roger & Me. Moore returns, 20 years later, to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, which that earlier work focused on, and finds that it’s where foreclosure notices for much of the country are being mailed from, and that the banking industry has proven as shortsighted today as the auto industry was then. In short, he says, this is what you get from letting big business dictate public policy, and letting it get too big. Moore liked capitalism when it helped create the middle class as we know it in the 1950s era when he was born. But now, it has outlived its usefulness and has to go.
The movie follows the usual Moore recipe, one part investigative journalism, one part personal narratives, and one part populist agitprop. The investigative part reveals some facts and figures you sort of knew if you were following the whole financial meltdown in 2008, as well as a mini-history of how we got there. One bit he uncovers is about how Wal-Mart and other large corporations took out “dead peasant” life insurance policies on low-level employees, thus actually positioning the companies to profit from death. This is fascinating, but not much of a real indictment of capitalism, since the companies cannot really be making much profit out of this unless they’ve figured out how to get insurers to offer money-losing policies.
More helpful to Moore’s anticapitalist thesis are internal Citibank documents happily declaring the United States a plutocracy, as well as the saga of the now-indicted Pennsylvania judge who took kickbacks for sending petty juvenile offenders to a privately run facility. This is the sort of incentive created by allowing private companies to handle traditional government functions.
Moore uses the personal narrative of one Midwesterner as an example of how someone could lose a house they’d lived in for decades, and on the other hand shows how some individuals fought back, like the sheriff who stopped enforcing evictions notices in his jurisdiction, or the workers who occupied a closed plant to get their final paychecks.
The agitprop comes when Moore takes money bags around to big banks and tries to get them to give back the bailout money. These stunts are not often my favorite parts of his movies, and this one doesn’t really show anything. Many of the banks had already paid back what they borrowed by the time this was released, presumably not by filling bags with cash.
Besides that, the movie is generally entertaining, but the pros and cons of the capitalist system is much too large a subject for a single feature film. Films like Roger & Me, or Sicko, focused on a single aspect of that system, and resonated more than this. What Moore wants to replace capitalism is “democracy.” Presumably this means not to replace private companies with Soviet-style bureaucracies but to have power in the hands of consumers, not large commercial enterprises. However, while most people will agree that the current system has resulted in excess, the future he hopes for, and the steps to get there, remain hazy.
IMDB link
viewed 10/11/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 10/26/09
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