filmland / By Charlie Myers

Got Capitalism? Whip It!

Michael Moore tries to fire up all ye dead peasants. Drew Barrymore does, too — with heart, and on skates

(Oct. 8, 2009) Previews

Opening Friday, Oct. 9, Vince Vaughn leads a group of married friends to a tropical island resort in Couples Retreat. They soon discover that participation in the hotel’s couples therapy is not optional. It could be a horror movie plot, but it’s Vince Vaughn, so let’s guess comedy. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language. 108m. At Broadway and Mill Creek.

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Reviews

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY: Michael Moore strives to live up to the logo for Fox News: “fair and balanced.” As such, his documentaries are unapologetically partisan and his humor only adds to the sting. In a series of films about aspects of American society, he has always had his “bad guys.” In Roger & Me it was GM, in Bowling for Columbine our love affair with guns, in Sicko the health industry, and now with Capitalism: A Love Story he takes on what may be the root cause of the disease eating away at our country.

The film begins with clever interspersed archival images of past aspects of our history with images from the recent economic meltdown. This is not a careful, detailed examination of the causes of the financial collapse, the bailouts or repossessed houses. Rather, it is a call to action for “ordinary” Americans to rise up and overthrow the evil that is called capitalism.

No one gets excited by flow charts or dissertations on derivatives. What does arouse people are pictures of families being evicted from their homes combined with the news that bailout money is being used to give out bonuses to top executives of collapsed institutions, and the humorous depiction of “experts” trying and failing to explain the concept of derivatives. And even though the film only skims the surface of the complex situation, I did learn at least one thing I had never heard of before: companies buying insurance policies for their employees and making themselves the beneficiaries. Wal-Mart called such deceased employees “dead peasants.”

Growing up in a working class family, I have always had a perhaps unreasonable bias against the wealthy. Once when running with a group, I remarked that rich people did more harm to the world than anything else I could think of, causing one runner to speed up and leave the group. This was no doubt a gratuitous and ill-considered remark, but Moore’s film is equally negative toward the rich. From my experience, our society has always been about class warfare, and the same class keeps winning.

A bonus for me in Capitalism was the images of the recently departed Bush; every time I get disappointed in Obama, I’ll conjure them up and give our President another chance.

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