Philadelphia Weekly

I must be mellowing in my old age, because Michael Moore movies don’t even make me angry anymore. Sure, the films are getting longer and sloppier, the provocations growing more muddled, but the cheap-shot demagogue’s latest muckraker, Capitalism: A Love Story, filled me with a sensation that’s previously been foreign to the Michael Moore viewing experience: boredom.

Now is the point in most reviews where the critic breaks down and admits that just because Moore happens to be on the right side of most issues, he deserves a free pass for everything. I’ll counter by paraphrasing a line Elaine May wrote for Kathy Bates in the great political comedy Primary Colors : “This isn’t how we’re supposed to win. We’re supposed to win because our ideas are better.”


Watching Capitalism: A Love Story , sometimes it’s hard to discern what Michael Moore’s ideas are—save for a free-floating, well-founded rage at corporate swine and their Washington enablers, all of whom ran the country’s entire financial system into the ground, gambling with your savings like a bunch of drunk tourists in Vegas and lying through their teeth until the bottom finally dropped out last fall. Of course, Moore’s angry. I don’t know anybody who isn’t. But what about the movie?


The first hour of Capitalism is almost entirely anecdotal, a disjointed procession of sob stories and greedy outrages tied together only by the filmmaker’s trademark condescending narration. A family loses their farm to foreclosure. Some airline pilots earn lousy wages and often apply for food stamps. Shitbag companies like Wal-Mart take out secret life insurance on their workers and score hefty pay-outs if an employee dies young. A crooked Pennsylvania judge took kick-backs from a for-profit juvenile detention center and doled out absurdly draconian sentences for minor infractions.


Moore cranks up the sad violins and wallows distastefully in these poor folks’ suffering, and any given tale might make for a fine television newsmagazine piece. But the movie still has no momentum or focus. It’s just a collection of crappy things that happened to people.


Capitalism ’s second hour locates a through-line, following last year’s stock market crash and the hasty, questionable bailout procedures that followed. But here’s where a basic philosophical difference irks me. Moore is always looking for conspiracies, when all I can see is incompetence. It’s probably comforting to think the last 30 years have been an epic con job conjured up by investment bankers and politicians—Moore’s narration just calls them “the Rich”—to bleed this country dry. To me, that would at least mean these people knew what the fuck they were doing when they drove us off a cliff.


Now would be the perfect time for a filmmaker of Moore’s considerable gifts to actually explain the baffling scams of subprime mortgages and derivatives trading, but the closest he comes to any scholarly discussion of economic issues is during a shopping trip with actor Wallace Shawn. (Yes, that guy from The Princess Bride . And no, I don’t know what he’s doing here, either.)


Later chunks of Capitalism suffer from a weary, valedictory tone, like an irrelevant classic rock band sludging through a greatest hits medley. He’s got the usual ironic use of archival educational films, his patented snarky music cues and, of course, the man himself eventually takes to the streets for facile stunts that serve no purpose besides hassling security guards and other assorted working people that he’s claiming to care about. The movie grows weirdly dependent on old clips from Roger & Me , Moore’s first, best and most focused movie—filmed long before his act calcified into shtick.


Perhaps realizing that he’s out-classed on a nightly basis by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Moore appears tired and defeated this time around. During his final monologue the filmmaker even admits that he doesn’t want to do this anymore.


So at least there’s a happy ending. ■