REVIEW: Capitalism: A Love Story

LITTLE ROCK — Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is anything but - he might have had a crush on capitalism early on, yet anyone who thinks that the two have been on friendly terms for a while hasn't been paying attention.

After years of needling big business in movies like Roger & Me and Sicko, he has finally decided to go after the system that, in his words, is dedicated to "taking and giving, mostly taking."

His timing couldn't be better, as the headlines are making clear. It's the morning after in America (where one of the big movie hits of the year is titled The Hangover), and Captain Mike is here to explain it all or at least crack jokes, milk tears, recycle the news and fan the flames of liberal indignation. Along the way, he also makes room for other voices, including those of striking workersand members of one family in foreclosure who videotaped the police breaking down the door to evict them.

Nothing if not direct, Moore cuts right to the point, opening the movie with surveillance shots of citizens robbing banks. He then introduces some wittily culledclips from a movie titled Life in Ancient Rome, which looks and sounds like one of those educational flicks you tried to sleep through in school and which he juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes.

America, in other words, is headed straight down the historical toilet, along with Nero and his fiddle (or rather Dick Cheney, who's anointed with a throwaway reference to the "emperor"), a thesis that Moore continues to advance if not refine with another hour and a half or so of alternatingly entertaining and distracting found footage; snippets from charming home movies; and assorted weeping, gloating, pontificating and sensible talking heads. Some of those heads are baffling (the actor and author Wallace Shawn,enlisted to explain free enterprise); some of them are sharp, welcome, bracing, provoking, mostly when they're able to talk without too much interference from the comically mugging, slack-jawed Moore.

Despite the waggish invocation of ancient Rome, the story in Capitalism more truly begins where and when its director did, in Flint, Mich., after the end of World War II. In broad strokes, Moore, who was born in 1954, positions himself as an Everyman whose family reaped all the usual rewards of postwar middle-class prosperity. Thiscollective dream begins to disintegrate rather fuzzily (cue the Vietnam War), coming to a bummer climax in the 1970s (cue an unsmiling Jimmy Carter in a cardigan) and culminating in the ascension of the Smiler in Chief, Ronald Reagan, whom Moore introduces as a "spokesmodel for president." Tax cuts, union busting and household debt ensue, as does some protest, notably in the form of Roger & Me, Moore's first movie.

Moore doesn't just refer to Roger & Me, he also includes some nominal highlights from that 1989 movie. A lot of performers like to replay their early hits, so it isn't surprising that Moore recycles images of his younger, slimmer self engaging in one of his trademark moves: trying to enter a building to speak truth to power, only to be turned away by security guards. It was faintly amusing theater then, especially if you didn'tthink too hard about the fact that he was hassling working people just trying to do their jobs. It's less amusing when he repeats the same routine in Capitalism.

He's on far firmer ethical ground when he doesn't use other human beings as props. Some of the more effective scenes in Capitalism involve his straightforward, journalistic interviews with peoplewho have been abused by the greed of their employers. In one segment he visits with a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company - a sleazy practice colloquially known as dead peasant insurance - which earned it a chunk of change when the woman died. (Even after death, your boss can exploit you.)

In the end, what is to be done? After watching Capitalism, it beats me. Moore doesn't have any real answers, either, which tends to be true of most socially minded directors in the commercial mainstream and speaks more to the limits of such filmmaking than to anything else. Like most of his movies, Capitalism is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it's also an entertainment.

As it happens, the most galvanizing words in the movie come not from the current president but from Roosevelt, who in 1944 called for a "second bill of rights," asserting that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." The image of this visibly frail president, who died the next year, appealing to our collective conscience - and mapping out an American future that remains elusive - is moving beyond words. And chilling: "People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."

It's a brilliant moment of cinema for the man delivering the speech and for Moore, who smartly realized that he'd found one other voice that needed to be as loud as his own.

Capitalism: A Love Story85Cast: Documentary Director: MichaelMoore Rating: R, for language Running time: 126 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 33, 35 on 10/02/2009