Capitalism: A Love Story

It’s old hat for reviews of Michael Moore’s films to belabor the obvious: his films are divisive, controversial and play fast and loose with rhetoric and the definition of documentary film. However, it is Moore himself—be he Barnum or Riefenstahl—who is the object of scrutiny. As the director, narrator and author of his films, Moore is the film. And in many ways, once you have seen one Moore film you have seen them all. 

This is true of Capitalism: A Love Story. All of the conventions established by his 1989 film Roger & Me are in evidence—even footage from the film itself. Moore’s use of narration comes across as sardonic and bathetic, and his ironic, archival footage is used to denounce craven executives and torment both lobby security guards and corrupt politicians. His trademark “gotcha” interviews and heartrending footage round out his recipe for blue-collar agitprop.

In Capitalism, Moore takes a broader approach, using the modern banking crisis as a springboard for a larger skewering of free-market capitalism. As one would expect in a 120-plus-minute film tackling so vast a topic, the results are more than a little scattershot. Moore makes liberal use of ripped-from-the-headlines statistics and the lives of victimized Americans, but fails to make a cohesive argument, preferring to swing his rhetorical brickbat to devastating effect.

And in the end, Moore, the fulminator-provocateur par excellence, succeeds in what he set out to do: not to convert but rather to unleash a scathing indictment of what he sees as a fundamentally corrupt system.