New on DVD: Precious and Capitalism: A Love Story

[Every week, usually on a Wednesday - sorry for the delay this time - I'll review one or several new DVD releases. And every Sunday, I plan to review a new release hitting or lingering in theaters. Stay tuned.]

Among its other bounties, March 9 brought two disparate, yet somehow overlapping, movies to disc. Both Precious and Capitalism: A Love Story are members of that rare breed, the socially-conscious American film. One is a narrative (based, as the advertising campaign never tired of reminding us, on a work of fiction by the author Sapphire), the other a documentary. One takes place twenty years ago (Precious is set in 1987), the other spans decades with the emphasis on how this history has culminated in the present day. And in the same spirit as these other differences, the films employ divergent approaches to their subjects. Precious zeroes in on the travails of its protagonist - the film touches on issues of race, class, sexuality, welfare politics, and education alternatives, but eschews didactic lectures (if not necessarily didactic characters or devices). Capitalism is, by nature, didactic - it's a Michael Moore film, after all, and even if he's toned down his personal appearances he still likes to tell us what he thinks and what he thinks we should think on the soundtrack.

Putting aside these obvious differences, take a moment to look at those posters. Some would suggest that their iconic, blocky form - employing recognizable silhouettes rather than detailed features - represent their explorations of American society: simplistic, broadly defined, perhaps cartoonish. I wouldn't necessarily go that far but the two movies are linked by a certain bombastic, preening thrust - and also by the very fact that they peek beneath the increasingly tattered surface of the American Dream, and can't help but be self-conscious about doing so.

Filmmakers of the Fall

A preview of coming attractions for the fall, with the focus on the directors behind the camera…

(Update 2010: links lead to the eventual reviews of these films)

Though the season does not officially begin until September 22, one doesn’t need the equinox to know autumn’s in the air. Every year, like clockwork around Labor Day, a breeze picks up, the air grows cooler, and one begins to detect a slight browning or yellowing on the edges of the still lushly green leaves. As the station wagon is packed one last time, the children cast melancholy glances at the twilit beach, to be abandoned for schoolbooks in a matter of hours. Yet with the shuffling off of lazy summer days, a new sense of purpose wafts in the air as well.

Sicko

(The above image is of a woman delivered by the hospital, via taxi, to a community rehab center after she could no longer pay for her stay. They essentially dumped her on the sidewalk where, addled and still clothed in her hospital gown, she wandered the streets until someone found her and brought her inside. She is one of many - others arrived still in pain or with IVs in their arms.)

Sicko is not an electric, polemical masterpiece like Fahrenheit 9/11; it feels longer than that film, is not as formally original, and drags in spots. However, it is a far more mature work, more subtle, more focused, and ultimately just as devastating. As "entertainment," I prefer Fahrenheit, but I have more respect for Moore's work in Sicko; flaws and all, he nails the HMOs to the wall and asks basic moral questions that can't be evaded. It helps that the subject he's dealing with is a no-brainer: why on earth does the richest, most powerful country in the world have such a shitty health care system? Why should the incentive of health care providers be to avoid treating people? Why, years after these problems became apparent, are we still unable to impose a solution? It may seem that these are "easy" questions, that there's no bravery in asking them. But the fact remains that we are currently stuck with an inhumane, indeed inhuman, situation and however obvious it may seem that it's wrong, the fact of its existence requires an outraged critique.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11 achieves a more total immersion than any other documentary I've seen. Which is to say, it erases the distance between the audience and the material, the emotional remove that remains when we watch the news on TV. Fahrenheit 9/11 plays as a narrative film, a story unwinding before our eyes in the way all Hollywood stories unwind, complete with the appropriate formal tricks (cutting footage to echo the mise-en scene of a screen drama) and subtle manipulations (streamlining facts to fit a conventional narrative). In erasing this distancing effect, in adopting the tools of narrative fiction rather than exploratory documentary, Moore crafts a powerful work, as personal as any auteurist art film, as immersive as any escapist entertainment. He also disables our ability to think and critically analyze what we are seeing, fashions a work of sublime propaganda, and crafts an intensely manipulative, misleading, and demagogic pseudo-doc.