Taking It Home: Inside Job

Finally, it all makes sense. Mostly.

Listening to the media echo chamber discuss President Obama's tax deal this week, I realized that it's been more than two months since I saw Charles Ferguson's illuminating Inside Job, and, shockingly, I think I still understand his deft explanation of the reasons behind the financial meltdown and, consequently, our current panic about tax rates and unemployment benefits. After numerous films - including but not limited to Capitalism: A Love Story (0/2 for Michael Moore after he dropped the health care ball with the forgettable Sicko), American Casino, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and even The Other Guys - tried and failed to explain what led to The Great Recession, Ferguson's film was like a breath of fresh air, illustrating the financial foolishness in terms that anyone can understand. Good thing, too, because as I said in my pan of the meaningless Wall Street, this was probably the last chance The Recession Movie had to establish itself as a viable genre.

Why was it so hard to present this financial information in a clear way prior to this film? To be fair it does require a lot of detailed explanation, and when filmmakers have other things on their minds (melodrama and an Oscar in the case of Stone's Wall Street; comedy and I-don't-know-what in the case of Moore's Capitalism), the meat of the subject at hand is guaranteed to be lost. Inside Job, in contrast, has little else on it's mind other than telling us what happened and, not accidentally, making us feel really angry about it. This isn't necessarily a fair and balanced documentary (and maybe not a documentary at all?), but it nonetheless presents the facts and allows educated people to talk about them, even though in this case the facts really speak for themselves.

Wall Street: People Never Change

Hair color may change, but an obsession with a certain shade of green never does...

If Oliver Stone is disappointed that his inconsequential Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps isn't nudging its way into the Best Picture race, he might consider sneaking it into the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Fact is, for American viewers the characters may as well be speaking a rural Turkish dialect as they argue and fret about the recent financial crisis. It's yet another aimless Recession Movie that ultimately serves no purpose other than to remind us that we still have no idea what a credit default swap is. We don't understand Wall Street, and thus we can't understand Wall Street.

But then, that's assuming Stone set out to explain this disaster in the first place, which we can rule out based simply on the fact that he doesn't actually portray even one financial shenanigan (leaving Charles Ferguson's upcoming Inside Job as the all-important final chance to explain the recession in Main Street terms). Instead, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a timeless examination of greed, similar to its prequel in an attempt to personify evil as a white guy in a dark suit.

To the extent that Stone successfully portrays bankers and brokers as scheming swindlers, we should be thankful. It puts us at much greater ease when we can pin the blame on them, the lenders, and not us, the borrowers, and Stone's stylish flair throughout the film, as unnecessary as it is to the story, still achieves an essential purpose in distracting us from the film's bleak central theme: people never change.

Although advertising firms and media headlines and magazine columnists naïvely and hopelessly attempt to convince us that we've entered a "new normal" in which people will spend sparingly and save wisely, the inconvenient truth is that 90% of Americans are earning and spending as much as they ever have (and in the case of the top earners, earning more than they ever have). Interest rates remain at historic lows and credit is still freely available to nearly anyone who desires it. As the recession begins to fade on a wider scale and the opportunities for easy money begin to emerge, we will be resurrected like millions of Gordon Gekkos, anxious to reclaim our financial kingdoms, no matter the literal or figurative cost. Isn't that human nature, or, at the very least, the American way?

300 Words About: The Other Guys

The Other Guys is: 1) an unoriginal slapstick laugher in the same vein as most B-grade buddy cop movies from the last decade; 2) a nonetheless distinctively styled film, punctuated by awkward pauses, timely pop culture references, and outrageous yet sacredly delivered dialogue that bears all the hallmarks of an Adam McKay/Will Ferrell production (the best being Anchorman, the worst being Step Brothers); and 3) a comedy with a conscience, complete with a closing credit sequence delivering devastating facts about the financial collapse and the evils of corporate greed. You know, because the bad guy in this movie is a financial swindler of some sort.

Kelly Reichardt: Off the Beaten Track @ the Walker

It's unclear to me whether this is a coincidence or the beginning of a trend, but for the second year in a row the Walker Art Center is holding a May retrospective featuring the work of a highly acclaimed American independent film director who most people have never heard of. Last year it was the rising star Ramin Bahrani, who most recently earned gushing praise for a short about a plastic bag (his third feature, Goodbye Solo, was one of my favorites of 2009). This year, it's Kelly Reichardt ("Off the Beaten Track", May 5-14), an understated filmmaker whose career has developed just as quietly, if not quite as rapidly, as Bahrani's.

300 Words About: American Casino

I don't know about you, but I find it such a relief when I learn I'm not the only one who doesn't understand what appears to be a simple issue, in this case the mortgage crisis. When a financial analyst in American Casino compared the financial calculations behind this entire mess as operating in the 4th dimension, I thought, Yep, that sounds about right.

We had a minority of bankers and brokers who developed an esoteric financial language that no one else could understand, and a majority of Americans who regularly buy fast food with credit cards and throw away unopened bank and credit card statements informing them of interest rate hikes. The eventual result, of course, is this mortgage-backed recession we've found ourselves in over the past two years. American Casino, which began filming in early 2008, illustrates what went wrong and who was affected. As you can imagine, it's not a pretty picture.

Taking It Home: Up in the Air

("Taking It Home" is an alternative review style in which I share my thoughts on a movie's themes and how they may relate to my life, while focusing less on the acting, writing, technical aspects, or even plot of the film. It's a collection of the ideas I took home, "because the movie experience shouldn't end in the theater".)

 

 My expression if asked, "What did you learn from Up in the Air?"...

For as much time and attention is given to the bothersome details of business traveling in Up in the Air, I'm surprised that airline food is never mentioned. Maybe it's because it would serve as an unfortunately accurate metaphor for the viewer: sectioned into bite-size portions like an in-flight meal, Up in the Air is tasty but ultimately unfulfilling. As a more direct metaphor, the film bounces from theme to theme like its main character bounces from city to city, with no apparent final destination in mind. I never felt like I got inside Ryan Bingham's head. He was an enigma and, like so many George Clooney characters, pretty one-dimensional.

Nonetheless, I liked Up in the Air. It was brisk, amusing entertainment showcasing a great ensemble cast. I just don't know what I supposed to take from it, which is particularly frustrating because I felt like Jason Reitman was trying so hard to teach me some really meaningful lessons - about loneliness and independence, unemployment and hard work, marriage and infidelity. But where were the dots connecting any of these very mixed messages together?

Taking It Home: Capitalism: A Love Story

("Taking It Home" is an alternative review style in which I share my thoughts on a movie's themes and how they may relate to my life, while focusing less on the acting, writing, technical aspects, or even plot of the film. It's a collection of the ideas I took home, "because the movie experience shouldn't end in the theater".)

 

 A method even less effective at inspiring change than Michael Moore's films...

Next time I get the opportunity to ask Michael Moore a question, I hope it will be part of an actual conversation instead of a Q & A where he has the microphone and I'm buried in the audience. That way he won't be able to sneak out of answering my challenge so easily. Yes, in a fit of frustration following a recent screening of Capitalism: A Love Story, I worked up the nerve to ask American's most notorious documentarian how he made a 126-minute film about money and capitalism without so much as mentioning personal financial responsibility. More on that later - including a video of Moore "answering" my question.

I have a tortured history with Moore, alternately considering him a genius, even a role model, before inevitably changing my mind and viewing his work as purely propagandic, sensational, and even counterproductive. Incidentally, I'm surprised that I have yet to discuss his films in any detail on Getafilm, I suppose a result of Sicko arriving a month or so before I started writing here (though you can see I came down pretty hard on it come Oscar time anyway). 

In any event, somewhere between Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 I realized Moore was  abandoning true documentary filmmaking - what I conservatively prefer to view as non-fiction storytelling - for something resembling schizophrenic scrapbooking. His arguments (never mind that documentarians shouldn't really make any) are an amalgamation of liberal talking points and moral sermonizing, but the resulting films are so disjointed they inhibit any in-depth thought or discussion about the issues at hand. He doesn't quite dilute the messages in his films so much as he drowns them out with his own voice, sometimes figuratively but always literally. Thanks to Michael Moore, a Michael Moore film is never allowed to speak for itself.

So what to think of Capitalism: A Love Story, which Moore claims is a culmination of all of his films since Roger & Me? Three things: 1.) this is not only one of Moore's longest films, but also his most deliberately emotional one; 2.) possibly by design but probably by accident, Capitalism: A Love Story ends up making a much stronger case for universal health care than Sicko did; and 3.) Moore is ultimately still more interested in inciting audiences than inspiring them, which is a tragedy considering the global reach and box-office success of his films.

Taking It Home: Frozen River

The face of soul-crushing desperation...

I can't remember the exact scene, but at some point in Frozen River I thought, "Man, this is for real." It may have been when Ray (Melissa Leo, above) asked her supervisor for more hours to work, or when she served her kids another meal of popcorn and Tang, or when she pulled a gun on Lila (Misty Upham, below left), who was refusing to return her stolen car. I was struck by the utter desperation of these characters, and it evoked a certain familiar feeling in me, one of gutwrenching empathy and helplessness. Though I haven't been to the New York - Canadian border where the film is set, and I've been blessed in my life not to have experienced that desperation to this point, I've still observed it firsthand in this country, at the San Diego - Tijuana border, for example, or in the Mississippi Delta, in the streets of South Boston, in San Francisco's Tenderloin District, or right here in Minneapolis. People in dire circumstances faced with decisions that I've never had to consider: shelter or food, heat or water, school or safety, lunch or dinner.

See this desperation enough and you develop an immediate recognition of that feeling. Several films this year already have triggered those thoughts in me, including Blindsight, Chop Shop, La Misma Luna, The Betrayal, and Up The Yangtze. While Frozen River is not a documentary, it leaves no doubt that there is a very real story behind it. Sadly, in an interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune critic Colin Covert, writer/director Courtney Hunt reported that following a New York screening of the film, someone approached her and said, "But people don't really live like that."

Uh, yeah, they do.

And the ignorance on the part of all of us who deny that fact is staggering. I can't judge you for standing idly by while these people struggle next to you, but I can sure get upset if you plainly deny that their struggle exists. No matter where you live (with a few exceptions), we're way too interconnected at this point to walk around pretending like what's happening in one place has no affect on what's happening in another. From taxes to gas prices to housing density to crime to food shortages, there is hardly an issue that exists in its own little bubble. I'm not trying to be cynical and preachy here, but it still astounds me that we can so easily overlook the connections between our lives and those of the people down the street or across the ocean from us. Frozen River perfectly illustrates this illusion of difference; Ray and Lila are basically living the same lives in two "different worlds" that are only separated by a few miles.

Does Frozen River offer any easy answers to the questions it raises about such topics as illegal immigration, poverty, broken families, gambling addiction, human trafficking, consumerism and the sovereignty of American Indian tribes? No, and I don't believe that was Courtney Hunt's objective. Like Chop Shop, this is cinéma vérité simply giving us an intimate look at the people living these lives around us. In that sense it's quite a success, made even more impressive by the fact that this is Hunt's first film.

Although Frozen River won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, I expect the only awards in its future will be for Melissa Leo and Courtney Hunt, and they will be deserved. Aside from that, it will probably fade into obscurity along with its peers (Chop Shop, Half Nelson, etc.) as raw, incisive accounts of contemporary America that most people would rather continue ignoring. In my opinion, it would be to our collective detriment to do so.

What did you take home?