Capitalism: A Love Story

Grade: C+

By most accounts, I’m pretty left of center – gay marriage, abortion rights, gun control, the environment, health care, education. Heck, I don’t even believe in immigration restrictions, because as a country of immigrants I don’t think we have the right to deny anyone who wants to come here – fling the doors open, I say!

But even I’m starting to find Michael Moore sanctimonious.

His treatise is pretty straightforward – in this country the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and yet no one revolts because of a belief in the fantasy known as “The American Dream.” The film begins with footage from a bank robbery – subtlety is not Moore’s strong suit. More than 2 hours later, we have witnessed tortured home foreclosures, agonizing factory lay-offs, gruesomely underpaid airline pilots (which apparently explains why their planes are crashing) and wrongly imprisoned teenagers (the judge gets bought off to send them to a for-profit juvenile detention center). An outfit called “Condo Vultures,” helps flip foreclosed homes, banking institutions take out “dead peasant” life insurance on their employees for self-profit, and virtually every single individual working at the Treasury Department is a former employee of Goldman Sachs. Congress is complicit, Ronald Reagan was evil, George W. has three 6’s on the back of his head. We get it.

In what is now becoming the slightly tedious and repetitious “Moore Brand,” the oppressed are respectfully documented with moral outrage, the oppressors lampooned and villainized with chagrin and disgust, with more than a touch of Moore self- aggrandizement thrown in for good measure. “For 20 years I tried to warn Detroit this day was coming,” Moore pronounces as General Motors officially declares bankruptcy. Moore’s overabundant voiceovers are starting to sound snide rather than tongue-in-cheek – when he castigates those of us sitting in the movie theater to “hurry up already” because he can’t fight the fight alone anymore, his ego becomes a tad intolerable. Flashbacks to his earlier “Roger and Me,” turn the whole affair into a vanity project.

Moore is always at his best when allowing his subjects and their situations to speak for themselves. Victims of our money-grubbing society are often profoundly heartbreaking and the money-grubbers themselves often display just how disgusting they are with little help from Moore. He is at his worst when delving into borscht-belt level shtick – arriving on Wall Street with an armored car demanding banks return federal buyout money, visiting the National Archives to see if the Constitution mentions capitalism (apparently it has the words We, Union, and Welfare instead, a clear indication the founding fathers were socialists) or taping yellow “crime scene” tape around one banking institution after another. In between such antics, Moore inserts stock movie footage so that he can dub Jesus into refusing to heal a man because of a “pre-existing condition” or show a diabolical “watch the watch” hypnotist to represent how our last President used fear mongering to lull us all into complacency.

What was often brilliant in films like “Sicko” and "Fahrenheit 9/11” is now merely tired.

Scenes of workers uniting to demand back pay and neighbors coming together to help a family squat in their own foreclosed home do inspire, but there is nothing especially new here that Moore hasn’t ranted about before to greater effect.

“Capitalism is evil, and you cannot regulate evil – you must end it,” Moore extols. Glad he’s not biased or anything.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232207/