Capitalism: A Love Story

I had something of a revelation about Michael Moore during  his latest, Capitalism: A Love Story: The man just can’t help himself.

Many of us watch Moore’s films and think: If only he’d be a little more temperate, if only he would lay it on a little less thick, if only he could avoid the easy mark or the knee-jerk sentimentality—then he could successfully deflect all of his critics.

But then, I realized, Moore wouldn’t be Moore. His mournful over-identification with the plight of the working man—and his sense of himself as their champion—isn’t manufactured or cynical in any way. It is who he is. It makes him great. It also, let’s face it, makes him a bit of a pain in the neck.

So it is with Capitalism: A Love Story, which is not Moore’s best work (I’d vote for Bowling for Columbine), but carries his usual sense of impeccable timing: America is just about as fed up with capitalism as he is.

Moore is grappling with his favorite themes here: Greed, government collusion, the exploitation of the working man. And he asks a rather provocative question: Has the American public been sold a bill of goods about the inherent fairness of capitalism? Is capitalism really a system where everyone can succeed or, instead, a system designed to create an inordinate gap between the super rich and the rest of us?

He shows us several families being evicted—in one case, a man being thrown off his farm bitterly thanks the bank for paying him $1,000 to do the cleaning and excavation of his own home.

He introduces us to a real estate agent in Miami, who owns the eerily titled Condo Vultures, scans the Internet for eviction notices, and proudly boasts that taking advantage of others’ misfortune is the very foundation of capitalism.

He shows us a group of laid-off factory workers in Chicago who stage an old-fashioned sit-in to receive the severance pay and benefits they are owed.

He shows how the corporate bailout bill was rushed through Congress with such obfuscation and alacrity that a few representatives, including our own Elijah Cummings, still seem shell-shocked by its passage.

And he takes us back to his home town of Flint, Michigan and uses it, again, as a symbol of the American dream deferred. Here were people who worked hard, raised families, believed in everything America stood for—and were still royally screwed by greedy corporations. (He even interviews his now feeble father, who looks on sadly at the sight of his old destroyed GM plant. “The people,” he responds when his son asks him what he misses most about his old job.)

Some critics have taken Moore to task for a gimmick where he pulls up in an armored truck, wraps Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms in yellow crime scene tape, and attempts to make a citizen’s arrest. But my audience cheered at those scenes—they were a much-needed catharsis.

Still, Moore’s cheap shots at Bush seem a bit tired at this point (didn’t he get in enough swipes in Fahrenheit 911?). And he sidesteps his hero Obama’s role in continuing the corporate bailouts (and, so far at least, in not backing the public health care option that Moore so persuasively argued for in Sicko.)

But say what you will about Michael Moore, when you see one of his films you know that you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll leave the theater with a little more outrage than when you arrived. I know I did.