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Michael Moore’s Anti-Capitalist Attack Dazzles Italians: Review

Review by Farah Nayeri

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- “Michael, we love you!”

Filmmaker Michael Moore is promoting his new movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” to the media at the Venice Film Festival. He is stopped in his tracks when an Italian female reporter unfurls a banner bearing those adoring words.

Moore is getting good press in Italy, where his movie had its world premiere. “Interessantissimo” (highly interesting), cheered the daily La Stampa, while Corriere della Sera gave it three stars out of four. La Repubblica devoted whole pages to the Michigan-born director, and reported that he had a double serving of spaghetti al pomodoro sent up to his hotel room.

The 55-year-old moviemaker has much to rant about these days, what with the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the $700 billion taxpayer bailout of the financial system. In his two-hour documentary, we see him try to take an empty canvas bag into the heavily guarded headquarters of a bailed-out bank, declaring, “We’re here to get the money back for the American people.”

Yet Moore covers a lot more than just the Wall Street rescue, or “financial coup d’etat” as he calls it. His documentary is a wholesale indictment of capitalism: funny, gloomy and even a little preachy.

“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil,” Moore lectures in the final voiceover. “You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that’s good for all people, and that something is called democracy.”

At the news conference, Moore said he had told his crew to consider this “the last film they let us make.” His aim, he said, was to “speak the words that need to be spoken,” and “raise the issues that need to be raised.”

Moore Echoes

What we get is a grab-bag, best-of-Michael-Moore compilation, with echoes of his other movies “Roger & Me” (1989), “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004) and “Sicko” (2007).

“Capitalism” opens with heart-rending foreclosure scenes. A young black man watches as his lifelong home is boarded up. A white woman sobs as a short-sleeved sheriff appears with an eviction notice.

“This is capitalism,” says the Moore voiceover, “a system of taking and giving, mostly taking.”

Next, we meet a Florida-based man who works for a company called Condo Vultures. It deals with clients who buy foreclosed homes and sell them at a profit. The difference between him and a real vulture? “I don’t vomit on myself!” he cackles.

As Moore’s movie zooms out to show the many other pernicious aspects of capitalism, it loses focus.

Reagan’s Election

For historical context, he provides a short lesson in postwar economics that starts with a depiction of his comfortable 1950s childhood as an autoworker’s son and ends with the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan.

“The country would now be run by a corporation,” says Moore, pointing out that Reagan’s Treasury secretary Donald Regan was previously the chairman and chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch & Co.

Moore then offers illustrations of capitalism’s worst excesses. A company running a juvenile home gets youths locked up for no good reason -- squabbling in a mall, mocking faculty on the Web -- so it can overcharge the state. Other companies collect hefty life-insurance payments on dead employees. Underpaid airline pilots live on food stamps, sell their plasma, and moonlight as dog walkers to make ends meet.

Moore shows how citizens are taking the matter into their own hands: through collective company ownership, through sit- ins, and through squatter action. He encourages them to do more.

Jesus Redubbed

In an openly religious section, he interviews a priest who calls capitalism “immoral, obscene, outrageous.” Jesus wouldn’t approve either, says Moore. He tries to prove it by redubbing an old movie and making Christ utter free-market messages such as: “He’ll have to pay out of pocket.”

“Somehow, I don’t think Jesus came to earth to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange,” Moore deadpans.

Not till the second half does Moore finally get down to what he has pitched his film to be: a lampooning of Wall Street. This section has an urgency that the others lack. It’s scathing, effective and hilarious.

Wall Street bankers are stopped on the street for a definition of derivatives. All are silent, except for one, who replies, “Don’t make any more movies!” A former Lehman Brothers executive and a Harvard University pundit are no better at explaining the financial instruments.

Goldman Sachs

Moore gives a blow-by-blow account of the bailout. He suggests that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s prior job as chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. led the administration to “use the taxpayers to bail out Goldman and other favored financial institutions.” (A spokesman for Goldman Sachs, contacted via e-mail, declined to comment on Moore’s statement.)

Here, the facts and figures speak for themselves, and Moore has a field day rolling them off. In the final scene, we see him sticking a long yellow strip of tape on a row of Wall Street security barriers. It reads: “CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.”

“Capitalism: A Love Story” once again shows Moore as a talented pamphleteer and a voice in American democracy. Only, the film runs on too long, and tries to be too many things at once. Moore’s best movies are single-issue ones, like “Sicko” (on health care) and “Bowling for Columbine” (about gun laws). Too bad this one didn’t make Wall Street the sole theme.