Moore Is Less

"Why would they do this?" Moore asks about the wealthy evildoers, whetting our appetite for one more awful truth. It's a very interesting question. (Perhaps the answer is the worst possible reason: because they could.) But as much fun as it may be to think of guys like Madoff and Stanford and Richard Fuld being marched around in orange jumpsuits, or of drastically limiting their pay, going after those guys ignores the evil of a system that made the vast majority of the fraud perfectly legal. The most recent conspiracy of fools only worked because it made hundreds of millions of middle-class Americans feel as though they were among the same wealthy that Moore is preparing to crucify. Only now has a sense of betrayal set in, which is the one thing that Moore has on his side: populism.

Which is, of course, why another major target of his upcoming film is likely to be the bailout money (as seen in Moore's theatrically broadcast teaser for the film). Most Americans were against the bailouts, though maybe not for the right reasons. I questioned the sense of bailing out, and then attempting to restart, a fundamentally unsound system. Others were just irked that high-paid executives were being bailed out. But the truth is that those guys made off with their loot long ago, and the net effect of the bailouts was probably to protect, at least temporarily, trillions of dollars in savings, pensions and retirement accounts, not to help out fat-cat shareholders and bondholders. Moore may run out of fuel on this issue for yet another reason: much of the bailout money is being repaid by the banks, with interest. Better hurry.

Unlike most of us, Michael Moore flourished during George W. Bush's reign of "misunderestimations" and malapropisms, releasing a trio of documentaries (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko) that were far more successful than anything he'd done before. Does anyone really remember 1995's Canadian Bacon (tagline: "It gets lonely at the top when there's no more butt to kick")? How about 1997's The Big One, which took in well under 1 percent of Fahrenheit's box office? Moore, the burly Michigan native who happened to be a liberal, made a perfect foil for W, the fitness-obsessed legacy child who pretended to be a cowboy.

Moore's movies have been stirring, sometimes rousing, not quite slick and always filled with belly laughs and tears. What they have not been is effective. Seven years after Bowling, we haven't passed substantially more stringent gun-control laws. The year that Fahrenheit was rushed into theaters, Bush was reelected by more than 3 million votes, even though he'd lost the popular vote four years earlier (Moore still took credit for avoiding a much bigger loss, as if that mattered). And even if Sicko has rallied some Americans around the idea of universal health care, the industry-inclusive proposal advanced by Obama bears no resemblance to the socialist models touted as ideals in the film. It's sad, because Moore could accomplish so much more.

Ultimately, Moore's new film must rise above mere entertainment or a populist pep rally for the most capitalistic of reasons: competition. Around the time that he announced his new movie, Fox put out word that it's fast-tracking a sequel to Wall Street, a movie in which Oliver Stone famously took down greedy corporate raiders, as epitomized by the character of Gordon Gekko. It's odd that, in the decades since "greed is good" joined the vernacular, we have not learned to separate financial fact from fiction. But maybe, just maybe, the legacy of Moore's latest will be to educate. Here's hoping that the film offers a more thoughtful, expansive analysis of a broken system than Wall Street 2.

James Scurlock is a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker whose 2006 film, "Maxed Out," and book by the same name tackle rising credit-card debt and predatory lending practices.
 

© 2009