Capitalism: A Love Story: Michael Moore Beats His Shtick to Death

Less a movie than a traveling circus, this scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop recycles Moore’s usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis. Capitalism: A Love Story is cobbled together from the director’s usual toolbox of film clips, potted labor history, and staged stunts with the director’s left-leaning pals. Given the current crisis, there’s some bitter fun in the sight of Moore wrapping the perimeter of AIG headquarters in crime-scene yellow tape like some unhinged Christo. But almost everything else is old-hat. If Capitalism feels stale, it’s partly because Moore isn’t trying very hard, but more crucially because, one way or another, everyone has felt the sting of the current crisis firsthand. College lefties will love the film as always, but will the Republicans and conservative Democrats whose lives have been shredded by the worst slump since the Great Depression show up? If so, they will at least see their plight writ large in a few moving moments. The last word goes to a gun owner whom we see being paid a measly $1,000 to clean up the site of his former home by the very bank that foreclosed on him. “There’s the people that’s got it all, and the people who don’t have nothing,” he says. Charlie Marx must be shouting “Toldja!” from his grave.