If Louis IX, our patron saint and the leader of many Crusades, were choosing his army of Crusaders today, he wouldn’t choose Michael Moore. After all, Moore is kind of fat, and he’s funny looking, and carries himself less like a Crusader than anyone I can imagine. Even though he’s a Catholic, he’d never make the cut.
And yet, Moore’s movie resume makes him one of the leading Crusaders of our generation, and he’s back with “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a full-fledged diatribe, not really against capitalism, but against greed and excess and the attitudes that make our Constitutional support beams sometimes seem to quiver beneath our feet.
Beginning with “Roger and Me,” in which he set out to confront the chairman of General Motors, Moore has the kind of courage that leads him to try to meet his enemies-real or theoretical-head to head.
As a writer and director, Moore is all over the place, taking a rather scattershot approach, bouncing here and there like someone with too many choices. When he slows down, and tells a story-even a short one-from beginning to end, he makes his points more strongly. As powerful a segment as there is deals with some judges and politicians in Pennsylvania who hire a private prison operator, kind of like hiring corporate-owned thugs to replace the Army in Iraq. Then, the judges find the rationale to send many adolescents to the private prison, justifying their kickback and penalizing hundreds of young people who may deserve punishment, but not the prison terms they are receiving.
“I refuse to live in a country like this, and I’m not leaving,” says Moore, a feeling we all get while watching him, up to his armpits in Congressional alligators, or when he tries to question Wall Street brokers. “What is a derivative?” he asks men leaving Wall Street fortresses, trying to find an explanation of the often-offered cause for the recent, and continuing, economic unpleasantness.
Moore is a man filled with passion, which sometimes overflows and gets in the way of some of his feelings. The camera work is extremely hurried, and Moore himself is a man in a hurry, always on the go to pressure one more Congressman, one more Capitalist.
Much of his argument is logical and easy to understand. Perhaps he could convince a few people of the need for government-run health care (Medicare works. I get much of my health care from it, and it works.), or the need for unions to keep a middle class afloat. But those who most need to see, and to think about “Capitalism: A Love Story,” are those who too often vote against their own best social or economic interests while their voices are desperately needed to return us toward Capitalism and Democracy, away from Greed and Avarice.
At multiple theaters
–Joe