‘CAPITALISM: A Love Story” sounded like my kind of film. I had heard Michael Moore found some exciting new historical footage, and I was picturing hot, steamy love scenes featuring Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan writhing atop piles of gold coins.
Imagine my disappointment. The movie turns out to be like a ’70s sitcom that starts normally, but then somebody says, “Say, this reminds me of that time Marcia got hit in the nose with a football . . .,” and we veer off into a clip show.
So here’s Michael, trying to get into the HQ of GM and being turned away by security just as he was 20 years ago in “Roger & Me.” Here’s campy archival footage showing communist soldiers on the march and George W. Bush being silly at a photo op. Oh, and here is busted logic, self-contradiction, tasteless jokes and ideas that are demonstrably, empirically wrong.
Then there are calls for armed revolution delivered in Moore’s trademark singsong, Bolshie bedtime-story voice. The movie ends with Moore telling us, “Capitalism is evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it.” Then he plays the bloodthirsty Soviet national anthem “The Internationale.”
With one exception, his biggest “gets” aren’t much. A North Carolina family (no identifying details are provided here or in most cases, so there’s no way of looking into the real story) has locked itself in a foreclosed house. Noises outside. Handheld camera. How Blair Witchy! Except that the sheriffs enter in the most polite way imaginable, delicately popping out a lock instead of busting down the door.
A scarier foreclosure victim, whom Moore lovingly shows gathering his guns (his antigun position of “Bowling for Columbine” has become inconvenient), mutters about how he understands why, when it comes to banks, “People go in there with bombs, blow ’em up, shoot people . . . anything that happens to them, they deserve.” Moore approves. He tells us in voice-over, “The only thing we didn’t know is when the revolt would begin” — one of several cheers for armed uprising, although what exactly his viewers in Santa Monica and on the Upper West Side will rise up against is anybody’s guess. The return policy at J.Crew?
Moore says he is the first to unearth film of FDR promising a “second bill of rights,” which is a valuable historical find if a vapid one intellectually. Roosevelt thought he could guarantee a job for all, and Moore says that Europe and Japan put that policy into practice. Spain, though, which has had a Socialist prime minister for five years, has an 18 percent unemployment rate.
At his most bizarre, Moore waxes nostalgic about the lavish compensation of his dad, a GM union man, proving our host is the last person on the planet to comprehend that the UAW bankrupted GM. “For 20 years, I tried to warn GM that this day was coming,” Moore claims. Actually, for 20 years he tried to hasten this day’s arrival, by razzing GM for cost cutting that kept it barely afloat.
Moore makes the same case for airlines, which were also bankrupted by unions, and blames the Buffalo commuter-plane crash last winter on the low pay of its pilots. This is science by anecdote: Moore thinks one crash proves air travel is getting more dangerous. Statistics say he is lying.
A longish segment stars Pennsylvania judges who sentenced kids to a for-profit juvie center in exchange for kickbacks — but since this is illegal and the judges are being prosecuted (both pleaded guilty in February but then withdrew their pleas in September), doesn’t this prove that capitalism coexists with anti-corruption laws?
Moore’s guests are ventriloquists’ dummies he props up on his knee so they can present views he shares. Doll-size actor-playwright Wallace Shawn is shown as a sage of economics because, apparently, he took a course on it once. Moore asks Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur whether the financial bailout was a financial “coup d’etat,” and she chirps the phrase back at him.
Driving an armored car to financial firms, Moore demands his money back — but isn’t it Washington that took money from the taxpayers? Shouldn’t Moore run his yellow crime-scene tape around the White House instead of Wall Street? Anyway, President Obama said this month that in cases where the government has fully sold its TARP bank holdings, it has gotten back its money plus 17 percent. Damn those capitalist barons, breaking into our treasury and filling it with their filthy money.
kyle.smith@nypost.com