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Friday, October 22, 2010
MOVIE REVIEW
Inside Job
"Wall Street Heist", Starring A Global League Of Looters
Hank Paulson, then-Treasury Secretary for George W. Bush, Fed Chairman Ben
Bernanke and current Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. All are chronicled
in Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job".
Sony Pictures Classics
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Friday,
October 22, 2010
Cold-eyed, clear and instructional, "Inside Job", produced, written and directed
by San Francisco native Charles Ferguson, is one of the year's best films.
Incisive, the documentary cuts through gimmicks for the sake of entertainment
and delivers an unmistakable if not unsurprising message: that deregulation and
outright thievery equaled prolonged agony for the global economy and everlasting
anguish for the public at large, whose life savings, homes and retirement funds
evaporated almost overnight over the last four years.
Narrated by Matt Damon, "Inside Job" is both a methodical documentary and a
suffocating one. As it carefully delivers its facts, figures and incidents
in a brochure-like presentation, you feel held hostage by the gravity of what is
described. After all, it's hard not to feel anger about the effects of
deliberate governmental inaction. The film examines the family tree of
institutions, corporate big-wigs, traders and how their manipulations of the
financial markets and their presence in American politics and government set the
stage for a major recession that crippled John, Joan, Jamal and Joaquin Q.
Citizen.
A film that doesn't ever break stride, "Inside Job" is everything you'd expect,
though it doesn't necessarily cover new ground as far as what we've already
known about the global financial crisis that culminated in 2007, exploding in
September 2008. The film is more a psychological profile of Tom
Wolfe-styled Masters of the Universe and their rapacious, arrogant ways, and the
machinery of power. A therapist talks about avarice and the hunger for sex
and drugs on Wall Street among type-A personalities, drawing an analogy of the
highs of extreme money-making being commensurate with the rush for other
high-risk taking activity.
Often devastating, "Inside Job" features revealing interactions with a parade of
other talking heads, some interesting and others whom you laugh at to keep from
crying. The film's highlights include interviews with former New York
governor and state attorney general Eliot Spitzer, financial governmental
officials and heads of state from various countries. One of the film's
most memorable lines (also in the trailer) is delivered by billionaire
philanthropist George Soros: "Chuck Prince famously said, 'We have to dance when
the music stops.' Actually the music had stopped already when he said
that." There's also a line spoken by a politician during a congressional
hearing that is likely to draw a big laugh.
The film's title may be provocative to some, who may instantly think of the term
"inside job" as being coined by so-called conspiracy theorist views of the
events of September 11, 2001. The devastation cast by the events of both
that date and September 15, 2008 were obviously very different, with scars that
penetrated millions in myriad ways. Mr. Ferguson wisely avoids stepping
into a dangerous minefield, maintaining a coherent, focused look at the
engineering of a deliberate, well-orchestrated white-collar wipeout of banks and
personal financial accounts.
Visually, "Inside Job" is one of the better-looking documentaries I've seen in a
while, with its sweeping shots of skyscrapers (as in the recent
"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), stock and
archival footage, and lighting. The conversational tone of the film's
interview subjects is never condescending or overly academic, only
straight-ahead and matter-of-fact and accessible to anyone with an appreciable
attention span. What each person says stays with you, and Mr. Ferguson,
who has made fine documentaries before ("No End In Sight"),
makes sure he has your rapt attention with this clinical and important work.
Mr. Ferguson's "Inside Job" is more level-headed than last year's
"Capitalism: A Love Story", but no less
passionate. Its populist exhortations may be absent on the surface but it
registers every bit as much on the Richter scale of outrage as Mr. Moore's
galvanizing film does.
"Inside Job"
is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture
Association Of America for some drug use and sex-related material. The film's
running time is two hours.
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