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Capitalism’s Little Tramp
TORONTO
“DO not get out of the car!” the private security guard barked at the driver from the back seat of a black van carrying Michael Moore and five striking workers from the United Steelworkers union (Local 6500). The event was the screening of Mr. Moore’s latest film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” at the Toronto International Film Festival and, as with most premieres, the sidewalk was packed with people waiting for the limousine doors to open.
But
as the driver pulled the van close enough to the curb to clip the
shoulder of a Toronto policeman holding back the surging crowd, it
became evident that this crowd wanted more than autographs. There were
picketers, homemade protest signs and people dressed as 19th-century
robber barons. Even the miners, whom Mr. Moore invited to bring
attention to their bitter two-month strike against the mining giant
Vale Inco in Sudbury, Ontario, looked wide-eyed at the spectacle last
Sunday.
“Uh, oh,” Mr. Moore said, looking out the front-seat passenger window. “They’ve got pitchforks.”
Mr.
Moore, a veteran of political action and perhaps the most successful
documentary filmmaker in history, had little reason to worry. Getting
out of the van, he waded into the crowd and greeted the protesters,
whose pitchforks were directed at the bankers and bureaucrats behind
last year’s huge Wall Street bailout. He then entered the Elgin Theater
and introduced the miners (wearing their full work gear) to the news
media, the warm mood broken only slightly when a reporter from
“Entertainment Tonight” asked sarcastically whether Mr. Moore had
arrived in a Cadillac.
“I don’t notice,” he said, asking if anyone knew the make.
“Jeez, I think it was a Ford,” one of the miners said, squinting into the paparazzi flashes that lighted up his face.
Canada
has been friendly territory since 1989, when Mr. Moore came to the
festival here to hawk his first film, a 16-millimeter documentary
called “Roger & Me,” about how General Motors abandoned Flint, Mich. Still living on weekly unemployment checks of
$98, Mr. Moore was a surprise winner of the festival’s People’s Choice
Award and his unlikely career rise began.
Since then, in films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Bowling for Columbine” and “Sicko,” his hulking figure shambling toward company executives and bewildered
security guards has become the postindustrial version of Chaplin’s
Little Tramp. This year’s entry is not a sortie on a particular
industry; it is a frontal assault on the very idea of American free
enterprise — a beast, he called it in an address to the Toronto
audience, “and you can’t tie it down with a flimsy piece of rope.”
For
this crowd that is a message that goes down as easily as weak American
beer. In the United States Mr. Moore’s conservative critics may decry
his popularity, but his films and best-selling books are far more
popular outside the country, especially in Britain, elsewhere in Europe
and in Japan. In such places Mr. Moore has become a kind of
anti-cultural ambassador — the prism through which a large part of the
world views the United States.
But a film that flatly concludes
that capitalism is evil is certain to put him at odds with most of the
left wing in his own country, and even with President Obama, who gave a speech the next day on Wall Street on the need to reregulate, not replace the financial industry.
“I
know what I’m facing when I go back across the Blue Water Bridge,” Mr.
Moore told the theater’s 1,500 cheering “socialist Canadians,” as he
called them. After the screening many in the audience looked for
ballots to vote again for Mr. Moore’s film for the People’s Choice
Award, which is sponsored by — who else? — Cadillac. Your tax dollars
at work.
HYPOCRITE. PROPAGANDIST. Egomaniac. Glutton. Exploiter. Embarrassment. Slob. These are a few of
the criticisms that have been lobbed at Mr. Moore since his career
began, and these are just the ones from liberals.
His arrival
with “Roger & Me” seemed to crystallize a contradiction in the
elite liberal sensibility, one that is still unresolved. Through
President Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Whitewater and Kenneth W. Starr, some liberals have craved their own class warrior, a Rush Limbaugh for the left who would take the fight unapologetically to the Republicans.
But faced with Mr. Moore (and later, Keith Olbermann) they recoil, claiming that kind of aggressiveness is somehow at odds with the notion of being a liberal. In a famous attack, Pauline Kael wrote that “Roger & Me” was “gonzo demagoguery that made me feel
cheap for laughing.” Funny — none of Rush’s listeners ever say that
about him.
“I don’t think they like a guy who is hovering around
300 pounds and walks around in a ball cap who comes from a factory town
and talks like where he comes from,” Mr. Moore said over lunch in
Toronto the day before his premiere here. “People want to have polite
conversation at their wine-and-cheese functions.”
Over lunch Mr.
Moore seemed more than polite enough. In private conversation he speaks
slowly and softly, broken up by an occasional Fat Albert laugh. Wearing
a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt under a dark jacket, his head bowed over his plate of pasta, he
could pass for a kindly Jesuit, even while trying to dab at the tomato
sauce spilled down his front.
And for someone who has often been
accused of playing fast and loose with facts, he seems to have an
almost pathological precision about dates and specific incidents,
framing sentences with, “The first reports came across the wire on
Saturday morning in Traverse City, Michigan” and “Dana Milbank wrote
about this on Page 10 of The Washington Post ... .”
He decided,
long before last year’s financial meltdown, that his next project would
focus on what he saw as the central thread of his films: how greed and
short-term thinking were undermining the middle-class life he knew
growing up. And he decided to reverse his usual filmmaking process by
making the argument first, then collecting his material.
“While I
was making ‘Sicko’ I began to think: ‘I’ve been doing this for 20
years. How many more films can I make when I’m talking about the car
industry in this film or Halliburton in that film or the insurance
industry in this film?’ And I was thinking, ‘What if this would be your
last documentary?’ Well, I wouldn’t pull my punches.”
As much as
Mr. Moore sometimes plays a comic-book version of class warrior —
Left-Thing vs. the Republic of Fear! — his politics are not grounded in
class as much as in Roman Catholicism. Growing up in Michigan, he
attended parochial school and intended to go into the seminary,
inspired by the priests and nuns who, at least until Pope John Paul II, inherited a long tradition of social justice and activism in the American church.
“The nuns always made a point to take us to the Jewish temple for Passover seders,” he said. “They wanted to make it clear that the Jews had nothing to do with putting Jesus up on the cross.”
Along
with a moral imperative, Catholicism also gave a method. Mr. Moore
idolized the Berrigan brothers, the radical priests who introduced
street theater into their activism, for example, mixing their own
napalm to burn government draft records. Their actions were a form of
political spectacle that, conceptually, is Marxist — workers seizing
means of production and all that — and it influenced some of Mr.
Moore’s best-remembered stunts.
The central conceit in “Roger & Me” was his futile pursuit to interview the chief executive of General Motors, Roger Smith.
And in “Sicko,” he took ailing rescue workers from ground zero to
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because detainees there were receiving excellent
health care. “Although I’m trying to say things I want to say
politically, I primarily want to make an entertaining movie,” he said.
“If the art of the movie doesn’t work, the politics won’t get through.”
To
make sure the politics do get through, Mr. Moore invokes the privileges
of much-better-financed producers and does market research. Jim
Czarnecki, a documentary filmmaker who has worked with Mr. Moore for
years, remembers screening “Fahrenheit 9/11” on eight consecutive
Tuesday nights for select audiences, gathering feedback and recutting
the film.
“We discovered what was clear, not clear, what worked
and what didn’t,” he said, adding, “Michael works hard to craft his
movies for a large audience.”
Mr. Moore’s obsessive reworking
produces results, but can also exasperate his collaborators. The day
before the screening of “Capitalism” he went to his sister Anne Moore,
who produced the film, with a new idea for cutting a scene. She looked
slightly exhausted in telling the story, then added, “but it was a good
idea.”
David Johnson, who produced “Michael Moore Live!,” a
one-man London stage show which ran in 2002, said that Mr. Moore would
often rewrite the script in the morning, then deliver the new version
“word perfect” that night. He added: “There is a frantic element that
surrounds him. Obviously, it’s something he requires. It is emotional
and sometimes spins out of control. But he’s also the first to
apologize and that’s unique.”
Mr. Moore admits that his frenetic
work habits — in addition to the documentaries, he’s written three best
sellers — are also therapeutic. In the last few years his personal mood
has wavered between what he calls “passive despair” and outright anger.
The work, especially the humor writing, he said, keeps him “from
finding out what’s on the other side of that anger.”
THERE ARE FEWER of the trademark Moore stunts in “Capitalism,” a sprawling 126-minute
film that tries to connect data points across the economy, including
the bailout, financial deregulation, privatized juvenile detention
centers, the collapse of the American auto business (again), “dead
peasant” insurance policies, Goldman Sachs’s influence in Washington,
the crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo, the Florida condo market and an
old-fashioned sit-in at a Chicago door-and-window factory.
In
part the stunts are harder to pull off for a famous, rabble-rousing
filmmaker. But at the movie’s heart is the original footage Mr. Moore’s
shooters made of workers inside the occupied factory in Chicago (his
was the only crew let in during the five-day strike) and of homeowners
being evicted. Mr. Moore retains an ear for ordinary speech that is
uninflected by the exigencies of morning talk shows or “SportsCenter”
clichés.
In one scene the neighbor of an evicted family in
Florida argues with the enforcer sent from the bank, telling him if too
many people are locked out, “the value of everybody else’s house goes
down.” That, on a more vast scale, is precisely the rationale offered
by the White House for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.
“One
of my favorite lines in the film, and I hoped it would provoke a
reaction,” Mr. Moore said. “The bailout in and of itself — the idea of
protecting people’s pension funds and hoping that everything doesn’t go
down a rathole — that’s not a bad thing. It’s the way it was done.”
When
it comes to the question of how exactly it should be done, the film
gets a little blurred. Although he likes to quote Scripture, saying
that the rich man will have a hard time entering into the kingdom of
heaven, Mr. Moore doesn’t offer a specific marginal tax rate that might
at least inch him along. Instead “Capitalism” tugs on the familiar
autobiographical thread of Mr. Moore, the product of a middle-class
upbringing spurned by the corporation and the system his family helped
to build.
This theme — class warfare as unrequited love — runs
through almost all his films, starting with “Roger & Me,” which can
be read as a kind of screwball comedy with Roger Smith in the Irene Dunne role of unattainable idol. As Iggy Pop sings in the “Capitalism” theme song, a version of “Louie, Louie” that
was specifically created for the film, “the capitalists just break your
heart.”
After the screening in Toronto, Mr. Moore took questions
from audience members eager to know exactly what they should do. He
offered some broad suggestions, stressing that he worried that
Democrats in the United States would begin to abandon Mr. Obama (whom
he enthusiastically supports) now that the election is won.
Pushed
harder on Mr. Obama, a gradualist seemingly out of step with Mr.
Moore’s radical agenda of scrapping capitalism, Mr. Moore only said
that he hoped for the best, but feared the influence of Goldman Sachs
on the administration. Finally, he just shrugged.
“You know,” he said, “the next movie may be about him.”