Capitalism: A Love Story

The American Dream is dead, says Michael Moore. The rich will get richer as the poor get poorer, and if you're sceptical, Moore is ready to trot out a series of graphs, confidential memos and, er, clips from old movies to prove it.

Capitalism: A Love Story is, like Moore's previous movies, manipulative and moving, funny and impassioned, uplifting and infuriating. Even if you're not a fan of Moore's politics, his in-your-CEO's-face questioning style, or his fashion sense (he still sports that ratty baseball cap), you've got to give it to him for tackling head-on the system that brought about the global financial crisis. Say what you will about him, the man's got an opinion, and he's going to do his damnedest to make sure that, at the end of the two hours you've spent with him, you share it. 

"How will America be remembered?" Moore asks in the film's ‘Fall of the American Empire' opening. Land of the free, or home of the heartless? We're shown the violent repossession of a house by a platoon of sheriffs who beat down the back door as the family's daughter quietly films the proceedings. Doubters in the audience will murmur to themselves that perhaps the occupants should never have taken out a mortgage they had no hope of repaying, but the examples that follow are even more heart-rending.

An Indiana family is paid a humiliatingly small sum to destroy their own belongings as the bank forecloses on the home they've owned for 40 years. Wal-Mart takes out what they charmingly term ‘dead peasant' insurance policies so they can cash in when sick workers die. Hundreds of laid-off Chicago workers lock themselves inside their former factory until Bank of America, bloated from a $25 billion government bailout, pays them the meagre paycheques they're owed. A homeless Miami family reoccupies their unsold but foreclosed house, with the support of their community, until police officers give up trying to evict them.

Despite all this evidence, it's Moore's own quiet outrage that really brings the point home - the slight wobble of his voice when he discusses his 1950s upbringing in Flint, Michigan, now one of the most dilapidated neighbourhoods in America, and the look on his elderly father's face as he surveys the barren junkyard that was once his place of employment. US-style capitalism, Moore argues, is a scam designed to swindle the vast majority of hard-working folks out of their money for the benefit of the richest one per cent: offering the tantalising possibility of private jet ownership and a corner office to all, but delivering only to a tiny minority.

The world of high finance is unfair - but it doesn't have to be. As Moore wraps the New York Stock Exchange in fluorescent yellow crime scene tape, he reminds us that the power is with us to change what we dislike. Michelle Lamont

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