The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (***1/4)

It was a war begun under a false pretense that lasted way longer, was more deadly, and proved much more costly than predicted. The outcome was not as planned, and that severely impacted the political fortunes of the president who had poured hundreds of thousands of troops into a faraway country. That was Vietnam. People under 45 or 50 won’t remember Daniel Ellsberg, and yet his actions indirectly may have led to the downfall of a president and to one of the most important First Amendment verdicts by the United States Supreme Court.

Ellsberg’s goal was to end the Vietnam War, though. Through his job as a United States foreign policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, he had access to a top-secret report about the history of US involvement in Vietnam. Notably, it was top secret not because it would aid the enemy, but because it would demonstrate the deception of American presidents and the unreality of upbeat assessments about the likelihood of success. After handing the report to The New York Times and other newspapers, Ellsberg earned both a federal indictment and, from President Richard Nixon, the epithet that gives this film its title.

This can be seen as a companion piece to The Fog of War, the Errol Morris documentary that featured Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara and Ellsberg were both originally supporters of the war (though Ellsberg with more reservations), and both realized that the US was not, as President Lyndon Johnson had told the public, winning the war. But whereas McNamara felt, until decades later, that his duty was to be loyal to his boss, the president, Ellberg came sooner to feel otherwise. Directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith allow Ellsberg to narrate his own story, incorporating recent interviews of him and others. Stylistically, the movie is not noteworthy. There is no Philip Glass score a la Morris’s work to lend a sense of urgency, and no fancy graphics. Minor re-enactments of certain scenes are included, and period footage, but mostly the movie is a typical “talking heads” documentary. Almost all of the voices, though, are of those directly involved in leaking the document, in Ellsberg’s life, or in related matters. One academic, people’s historian Howard Zinn, appears, but as one who knew Ellsberg in the 1970s. Nixon is heard on tape, wondering in one excerpt whether dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam might not be a good idea.

While little new information is revealed, this is a very well organized look at a piece of history that any American ought to know.

IMDB link

viewed 4/14/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/15/10

Capitalism: A Love Story (***)

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

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (***3/4)

The riveting story of the arrest and interrogation of a Munich dissident in 1943 is a true story that feels like one as well as a revolting but fascinating look at the Nazi judicial system.

One of the nominees for this year’s foreign-language film Oscar (it lost to Tsotsi, but would have been my choice of the four I’ve seen), this is the absolutely riveting story of the arrest and interrogation of a political dissident in Nazi Germany. In 1943, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, members of a group called White Rose, were arrested for distributing anti-government flyers at the University of Munich. Sophie, played quite well by Julia Jentsch (of 2005’s excellent The Edukators), denies guilt, but unless you forgot to notice the film’s title, there’s not a lot of suspense about her eventual fate. Yet that doesn’t detract from the movie at all. Part of it is knowing that the story is true. Watching it, you wonder if you’d risk your life to distribute leaflets, if you’d maintain hope seeing your country in the hands of a Hitler, if you’d sell out your friends to save your life, and so on. The interrogator (Gerald Alexander Held) is also compelling. He’s not amoral, and clearly feels sympathy for Sophie, yet feels duty-bound to apply the laws of an immoral regime, which he does skillfully. Finally, the look at the appalling Nazi judicial system is notable. Definitely worth a look.

IMDb link

posted 8/23/13