Based on his track record, it would seem Michael Moore isn’t a person most moviegoers long for. But the makers of American Casino—released as accidental counter-programming to the similarly themed Capitalism: A Love Story—have made it happen. An intelligent and well-meaning but utterly juiceless attempt to explain the prime mortgage catastrofuck, it’s superior to its more hyped competition in many ways, taking one of Capitalism’s many concerns and expanding upon it.
The only sane response to American Casino’s findings is frothing anger, and yet director Leslie Cockburn’s tone is ice-cool, and to a fault. There needn’t be tussles with rent-a-cops or “ironic” music cues, but is it too much to ask for more than a plodding procession of talking heads and staid “human interest” segments? Perhaps a score that isn’t mostly Moby on shuffle?
But that’s not American Casino’s big problem, just its most superficial. The idea is to break down and then expose the greater conspiracy at the heart of the mortgage crisis. And it really only succeeds at the latter. The expected gaggle of insiders and experts sit in front of the camera to speak to the layman about the labyrinthine details that resulted from the massive industry deregulation, and exactly how banks—suddenly and happily unaccountable—went about roughing over the clueless (and sometimes the not so clueless). They mostly fail; one guy actually keeps pointing to a computer screen covered in gobbledygook numbers.
But that, of course, is probably the point. After all, as American Casino convincingly reveals, banks would use obfuscation as a tool, speaking in impenetrable terms to clients they knew would be unable to follow through on payments—language so dizzying they could even fog the mind of hardened lawyers. By way of illustration, Cockburn takes a page from The Wire and hews close to a Baltimore neighborhood where 700 houses have been foreclosed upon. Victims talk about hidden fees appearing from nowhere on the first bill, and testify to a concentrated attempt to prey on lower-class minorities.
American Casino may sport a more narrow focus than its meandering Michael Moore counterpart, but in some ways it’s only slightly more useful. It, too, practices over-simplicity. It, too, sides so much with the working class that it assuages them of even the teensiest bit of guilt. It, too, leans too hard on the “human interest” angle. Surely there will come a time when a film will sufficiently break down and diagnose our current economic imbroglio. But this ain’t it. C+
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