"It may turn out that wealth can ravage a city's vitality even more than poverty." The documentary '645 Wellington' commences with this intriguing quote, clearly pregnant with analytical promise, set in text against an otherwise blank screen.
It's an auspicious beginning, however, disappointingly, the intriguing questions it raises are not ultimately addressed by the film. The filmmakers do not articulate an argument and the material they include, while sporadically thought provoking, does not knit into coherency. While of course, reality is, in a sense, an infinite chaos that inevitably eludes summary, if one is to make claims like "wealth can ravage a city's vitality even more than poverty", then one has moved beyond that elementary position, and one needs to imagine a strategy for evaluating the claim, and to then seek to put it into action. No strategy for doing so appears to have been developed in this case, and thus, the film fails to clear the hurdle it established for itself.
Also, some of the interviews were neither particularly revealing nor good-natured. As a rule, I am inclined to think that where there is some pressing reason why they need not be in the second category then they ought to at least be in the first.
Nevertheless, for all that, the film features some highly compelling footage of a man struggling to avoid eviction owing to his repeated failure to meet his rent payments. It is quite poignant, though largely because he is clearly unable to cope with the sum demands life is placing upon him, rather than because he is being treated unfairly by the specific landlord, as the film seems to imply. With a bit of help though, it rather seems like he would be able to function. He's clearly the kind of man who would survive, and perhaps make a go of it under a socially conscious government, but would probably die a terrible and lonely death on the streets under a rigorously "market oriented" one.
