In his latest, "Capitalism: A Love Story," the Michigan filmmaker spends 120 minutes dissecting the country's current economic crisis, for-profit prisons, home foreclosures, how the government threw a TARP on us, and a disturbing trend known as "dead peasant" insurance policies.
Like most of Moore's material, sometimes it's savage. At others, he shows that he's picked a subject too big for his space, as though he's entered a mixed martial arts battle with an elephant.
"Capitalism" features this familiar give and take. When Moore points out that the country's top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined, I'm thinking Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello is on to something with his "Arm the Homeless" guitar.
When Moore starts interviewing priests and bishops and coos them into stating "capitalism is evil," I wonder why he reduces his point to such basic terms. We, the people, need some sort of economic system — sorry, anarchists — and no system is perfect. Reducing the issue of capitalism to name calling is an oversimplification.
This is how the Flint, Mich., native cherry picks his points and his information. It's also why I have a love/hate relationship with his work.
Yes, Charlton Heston made the "from my cold, dead hands!" speech many times, but not, as his 2002 film "Bowling for Columbine" suggests through clever editing, during the late National Rifle Association president's visit to Colorado immediately following the fatal high-school shooting at Columbine High School.
"Capitalism" calls back to his first major work, 1989's self-produced and self-funded "Roger & Me," where he unsuccessfully attempts to get a sit down with General Motors CEO Roger Moore to try and understand the economic choices the company is making. What he really gets is a portrait of Flint on the decline in the 1980s. Many subsequent Moore films have revisited the town, finding it in a worse state each time.
In "Capitalism," Moore thematically revisits his first work, visiting GM headquarters for another unsuccessful CEO sit down just before the nation's auto industry began to crumble in late 2008.
Moore has always been at his best when he's sticking up for the little guy, pointing his cameras at big bully corporations who make bad decisions. He uses his celebrity and negative publicity to shame people into doing the right thing, like that time on "The Awful Truth" where he shamed an HMO into giving a diabetic the pancreas he was denied.
He's also great at making the awkward-but-necessary stand no one else will, like running a Ficus plant for Congress to illustrate the uselessness of some elected officials. ("Ficus: His a-- IS a hole in the ground" was one clever campaign slogan.)
Sometimes, he goes too far or struggles to find a conclusion that doesn't quite fit: When he marched up to Heston's mansion and laid thousands of hand-gun deaths at his doorstep at the conclusion of "Bowling," I was left scratching my head. It was a ballsy move, but was unfair to Heston.
So, when it comes to Moore, you kinda have to take the well-fed slacker you get. I admire a guy who can go to work in a baseball cap and sag his jeans. I like a polemicist, too, someone who just likes to symbolically wad up issues like pieces of notebook paper so he can use them as spitballs.
I've seen a number of his works, too, so I feel comfortable in saying that Moore doesn't hate America.
He wants it to be better. Sometimes his message doesn't match his moxie.
Despite his flaws as a filmmaker, he's still standing up for the little guy.
It's what he did on "Roger & Me." It's what he does with "Capitalism."
Sometimes he's a little misguided and sometimes he cherry picks his facts, so it's helpful to take his works with a heavy dose of skepticism.
But in a country that so proudly clings to the notion that it's No. 1, Moore and I want the same thing — to make a good nation even better.
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