Capatilism: A Love Story is classic Michael Moore — at times annoyingly simplistic, but also galvanising in its ability to stir shocked laughter and indignation.
The lumbering provocateur from Michigan has honed his schtick by now, and in this steamroller attack on the culture of greed in America’s corporations and financial institutions he rolls out all the usual tricks: sentimental zooms on tearful faces, comedy montage sequences, the careful selection and editing of interview footage to make the good guys look better and the bad guys worse, the snarky voice-over.
It’s proof of Moore’s bravura that we can see through these techniques and still be swept along by the sheer force of the film’s righteous anger. TThe director’s critics tend to ignore just how well edited his documentaries are; Capitalism has the inexorable drive and surge of a Rossini overture. It shows Moore at his most earnestly heart-on-sleeve, backing the common man, the ordinary saver and the laid-off worker against fat-cat banks, corporations and mortgage gamblers.
Moore is a skilful polemicist, and this US-centric cine-pamphlet goes straight for the jugular, suggesting that the seeds of last autumn’s bank meltdown and the current recession are inherent in the capitalist system that has somehow become identified with democracy and social justice in the States, even though laissez-faire economics are never once mentioned in the American constitution.
The director comes up with some chilling examples to illustrate his point that capitalism and ethics rarely make good bedfellows, including an eye-opening passage dealing with "dead peasant" policies — life insurance contracts that companies take out in secret on their own employees, so they are literally worth more to them dead than alive. The only point where the director seems to hang fire is in his kid-glove, wait-and-see treatment of President Obama. Even Moore seems to realise that it might take the guy more than a few months to become the Franklin D Roosevelt of the 21st century.
Capitalism A Love Story
