CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Michael Moore
Look out, corporate America. Puck is at it again. With his shambling bulk, baggy clothes and baseball cap, Michael Moore more closely resembles a working-class Falstaff, but if he could somehow magically turn the chairman of Goldman Sachs into a jackass, there's no doubt he'd do it. He does the next best thing, indicting those at the top of our financial system on broad-based charges of greed and corruption at the expense of everybody else. As usual, Moore's weapon of choice is a scattergun, not a laser, but also as usual, his sense of purpose is unwavering. He doesn't just want to make you laugh or piss you off. He wants you to think and act. So he takes aim at the mortgage debacle and the bank bailout, but his most provocative finding here is a policy practiced by Wal-Mart and other big corporations, to take out life insurance policies on their employees (referred to, in writing, as "dead peasants"), and collect huge payoffs - the money going to the company, not the survivors - when the "peasants" pass. To suggest that Moore loads the dice, stacks the deck and engages in what might be called grandstanding is to overstate the obvious. He does that stuff, sure. But he also makes the point, emphatically, over and over, that the real face of our free-market economy doesn't belong to the crooks in the glass towers, but the dispossessed. He's mischievous, that Puck.
