In a time when documentaries are called upon to illuminate the injustices of our excesses in modern society, there could be no larger calling in the United States than to delineate the downfall of our economic structure in the late 2000s. One could then easily say that a documentary filmmaker would do best to present this descent in a manner palatable to the layperson while maintaining rigid control of bias and managing to sneak in some entertainment while we sit being educated for 100 minutes, and it would appear that such a filmmaker has decided to step forward and present us with this film.
Of course, to assume that every bit of this crisis could be proffered in such a short period of time would be madness; the tendrils of this calamity extend back farther than any of us could imagine and follow more strings than we could hope to understand. Fortunately, this film deconstructs the facts and figures as best it can, often providing similes to give the less mathematically inclined some method to track the data as it is offered.
The biggest crime of this movie is that it is occasionally too dense to be followed by such a person, but this, in itself, is not a damnable offense; in the age of the internet, the simple act of misunderstanding a word in a sentence begs that we use the sources at our disposal to seek enlightenment, and with that the entire body of the film unfolds with natural grace. Narrated by an all-star actor and featuring upscale models that animate as the monologue unfolds allows the audience to get at least an impression of what is being related at every juncture.
The hallmark of non-direct cinema documentary is interviews, and while interviews have the unfortunate burden of being edited to fit the maker’s intensions, it’s impossible to avoid the amount of dodge extended by the principals when it comes to answering simple, direct questions, and at least one segment features a decidedly biased interviewee literally challenging the maker to ask him further questions when he feels himself backed into a corner by the type of query that a child would see as standard. Other interviews from those who attempted to fight the collapse, in particular the unfairly maligned Eliot Spitzer, offer a contrast of disclosure that is both comforting and nauseating given their relationship to the collapse.
It’s the type of film that is rightly granted release and accolades in accordance with its message; the film is certainly timely, it is extremely well constructed, and it encapsulates the crisis in a way that few other bits of media can. It may not end with the forward entreaty for change that a film like An Inconvenient Truth might, but after all, if change were possible due to the writing of a few letters of discontent, the whole fiasco likely would have been avoided in the first place.
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