| 1 | | The bankrobbers caught on a security |  |
| | camera at the start of Capitalism: A Love |
| | Story are a forlorn and feeble bunch. We |
| | see a shabby old man in a Hawaiian shirt, |
| | and a 12-year-old boy wearing a |
| | balaclava. The real crooks, however, are |
| | the banking CEOs who recently got away |
| | with $700bn of public money. |
| 2 | | Michael Moore's documentary drew |
| | tumultuous applause at the Venice film |
| | festival in 2009. The film shows that the |
| | real villain, of course, is capitalism itself. |
| | In America the top 1% of the population |
| | control 95% of the wealth. |
| 3 | | Capitalism: A Love Story is by turns crude and sentimental, passionate and |
| | inspiring. It shows a simple moral universe inhabited by good little guys and evil big |
| | ones, and the force of its argument proves hard to resist. |
| 4 | | Moore has done a fine job in finding out the human stories behind the headlines. |
| | None of these is so horrifyingly absurd as the tale of the privatised youth detention |
| | centre in Pennsylvania, run with the help of a crooked local judge, who railroaded kids |
| | through his court for a cut of the profits. Some 6,500 children were later found to have |
| | been wrongly convicted for such minor offences as smoking pot and "throwing a piece |
| | of steak at my mom's boyfriend". The subsequent bill for their imprisonment went |
| | directly to the taxpayer. |
| 5 | | No doubt, Moore had concluded, well in advance of making this documentary, that |
| | capitalism is both un-Christian and un-American, an evil that deserves not regulation |
| | but elimination, but no matter. There is something energising - even moving - about |
| | the sight of him setting out to prove it all over again. Like a detective he gathers the |
| | evidence, takes witness statements from the victims and then starts harassing the |
| | guilty parties. "I need some advice!" Moore shouts to some hastening Wall Street |
| | trader who has just left his office. "Don't make any more movies!" the man shoots |
| | back. Moore chuckles at that, but the last laugh is his. This, more than any other, is |
| | the movie they will wish he had never embarked on. |
| | |
| | guardian.co.uk, 2009 |
