The most shocking thing we learn in Michael Moore's new movie is that the notorious lefty agitator wasn't always a rebel.
Flashback biography of his blue-collar upbringing in Flint, Mich., shows Moore to be a contented kid who worshipped his autoworker dad and admired the Catholic priests from whom he received his sense of social justice, and whom he cites for his thesis in "Capitalism: A Love Story" - that all capitalism is evil.
OK, but where were the nuns?
I ask because Moore is known for two things - the religious fervor of his class activism and his accompanying lack of discipline.
"Capitalism" is quintessential Moore - full of funny and moving material, but also full of impulsive acting out, diversions and contradictions. Stuff that a rap to the knuckles in composition class might have eliminated.
Moore's on solid ground with families swindled out of their homes, and gets some genuinely inspiring footage of workers staging a sit-in when their employer attempts to strip them of severance and other benefits.
But do we need a summary of 20th-century economics from . . . Wallace Shawn? And when Moore goes in search of a workers' paradise, he finds a bakery and an engineering firm with owner-operators. I'm no Wallace Shawn, but they seem like capitalists. Is there any chance they'll go on strike?
No matter.
It's all filler before Moore finally gets around to the money shots, as it were - his tragicomic revisiting of the financial system's implosion, brought about by "innovations" like derivatives.
There are funny scenes of Moore trying to get Wall Street geniuses to explain what derivatives are. We still don't know what they are, he implies, but we know what they do - take trillions in national wealth and make it disappear.
There is almost no way to wrongly tell this tale of hubris and waste (I also recommend CNBC's "House of Cards," which runs regularly in the evenings), followed by whining and hat-in-hand groveling by the perpetrators.
And Moore brings his own snarky edge, leavened here by the fact that Wall Street certainly has it coming. If anything, he doesn't go far enough - unmentioned, for instance, is the way the government used failed insurer AIG as a bagman for huge cash payments to favored banks, like Goldman Sachs.
