Capitalism: A Parable

It’s hard to separate the positive and negative qualities of the new Michael Moore film, Capitalism: A Love Story. What’s good about the film is also what’s bad about it.

Moore is back doing his faux-innocent schlub routine at GM headquarters and in front of the Wall Street stock exchange, and it falls pretty flat. He inserts himself into, plops himself down on, his subjects’ life tragedies and milks them shamelessly. He’s either clueless about how people lost everything and were thrown out of their homes or uninterested in the details. Instead, he falls back again and again on outrage.

I think that is the key to Moore: he’s against Bad Things being done to Good People. His films are less documentaries than morality plays.

Moore confesses in Capitalism that he was brought up in Catholic school and once wanted to become a priest. Actually, that’s exactly what he did. He hasn’t got the patience or the subtlety to get underneath how the machinery of government and Wall Street came together to destroy home ownership and nearly wreck the financial system. But he’s called, driven, to witness against Sin, and he shambles through his own films holding the cross high.

Appropriately, two bishops have cameos.

Like a good Irish prelate, Moore has a terrific sense of humor, and he’s at his best when showing how easily we are fooled by Old Scratch in the form of come-ons, scams, advertisements and the culture of self-satisfied, material indulgence, the yearning to be wealthy despite Jesus’s warning about the rich and camels passing through the eye of a needle.

Moore’s polemics are enjoyable and even laudable as long as we don’t expect coherence or political guidance from them. They’re full of wacky insights and appalling tidbits and they make us laugh, which enables the awful truth of what’s happened to go down more easily.

But Moore is off base in his concluding narration when he mourns that he needs more people to join the crusade because he can’t ‘keep doing this’ by himself any more. Moore isn’t about to share his stage, and if he thinks he’s leading a political movement, he’s over-written his own part.

But Father Michael’s a valuable piece of our political landscape and can frame an argument in a unique way. I’ll pay to hear his sermons.