Inside Job

"Inside Job" reminds us, at a pretty rough time, that the ongoing $20-trillion-plus global economic crisis is not the capitalistic equivalent of an act of nature. Rather, it came from a few thousand individual acts of human, craven self-interest, supported by existing financial regulations (or vacuums where the regulations used to be) and driven by what was possible, but not, in any humane sense, advisable.

Writer-director Charles Ferguson's previous documentary, "No End in Sight," did a spectacularly assured job of explaining how, and why, America's invasion of Iraq went the way it did. No one -- right, left or center -- could seriously question its research, its rhetorical logic or its conclusions.

In contrast "Inside Job" finds the compellingly wonky filmmaker, who is more about talking-heads intelligence than cinematic dazzle, venturing a little further down the road of polemical viewpoint. He succeeds, I think to a remarkable degree, in making his interpretation of a more far-reaching disaster comprehensible to those unschooled in the ways of asset-backed securities and credit-default swaps.

The movie is shaped like a funnel, beginning narrowly by describing how the Icelandic banking system went nuts and got greedy and set the tone for the fiscally deadly pratfalls of 2008 there and beyond. Now, before you quit reading, I must tell you that this is more interesting than it sounds. Why? Because Ferguson knows how to make it so. This is prologue as microcosm and it prepares us for what's to come.

Elements of many documentary traditions coexist here. There is the well-earned "gotcha" tradition (separate from, and greater than, the unearned "gotchas" of lesser filmmakers), such as Ferguson's questioning of David McCormick, former undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of Treasury, whose weaseling really is something. There is the Michael Moore brand of ironic musical scoring (less interesting). Mainly, though, Ferguson takes the time to be clear about what he's arguing, and whom he's blaming for what. With just two feature-length talking-heads docs, Ferguson has done a great deal to restore confidence in the genre.

Matt Damon narrates, and I do wish the narration didn't end on such a generalized, throw-the-bums-out note, over footage of the Statue of Liberty. Ferguson doesn't take naturally to rabble-rousing tactics, which is to his credit. Nonetheless the film stokes equal amounts of anger and sadness. Filming in the U.S., Iceland, England, France, Singapore and China, "Inside Job" contains explanatory passages wherein the sheer blobby, depressing nature of the subject temporarily gets the better of Ferguson (though hardly to the degree "Capitalism: A Love Story" tripped up Moore). This film's rich, often dissonant chorus of voices gives that subject amplitude, however. Economists, bankruptcy lawyers, journalists: The perspective truly is a global one, and this global recession deserves nothing less.

 

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"Inside Job" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some drug- and sex-related material).

Running time: 1:48.

Narrated by: Matt Damon

Credits: Written and directed by Charles Ferguson; produced by Ferguson and Audrey Marrs. A Sony Pictures Classics release.