July
21, 2004
The
Corporation is doing surprisingly brisk business here in Minneapolis.
By the time I finally managed to catch a show, I had already been
turned away twice because the theatre had sold out, and once I was
inside, I had to scramble to find a seat.
The
lines around the block is good news for everyone who was overjoyed
by the overwhelming success of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit
9/11. That film touched a nerve in America, and people are
searching for an encore, for the next documentary polemic. The voters
are angry and they’re looking for alternative voices.
Jennifer
Abbott and Mark Achbar, the film’s directors, are sure to
be happy for their good timing. The Corporation made a
successful run on the film festival circuit (including the Minneapolis/St.
Paul International Film Festival, where it won the top prize), and
now Michael Moore’s clout will enable it to reach audiences
that otherwise would never have noticed.
I
think The Corporation is a good movie, and I think it’s
an important one; but it isn’t a great movie. It could have
been if the filmmakers were more disciplined or more focused, and
willing to let the audience draw its own conclusions. Watching this
film is like listening to an impassioned preacher deliver a long
sermon; you enjoy the sermon, you mostly agree with what you hear,
but eventually you just become worn out. The preaching just goes
on and on and on. You just want to wrap things up, and the minister
keeps pulling out another three chapters to read.
Perhaps
the overall tone of the film brought this about. The Corporation
serves as a laundry list of corporate abuses and crimes in the name
of relentless profits, and the damage wrought over the past century.
We see Bovine Growth Hormones, pollution of land, air, and water,
third world sweatshop labor, cruelty to animals, chemicals on the
farms, chemicals in our hair, chemicals in our food, strip-mining,
fossil fuels that cause global warming, genetic manipulation, genetic
mutations, birth defects, the explosion of cancer.
We
learn the history of corporations, from its humble roots to the
infamous Supreme Court decision, argued in the name of the then-new
14th Amendment to the Constitution, that declared a corporation
a legal person. Only these persons have resources far beyond any
of us, um, people. And we witness global corporations evolve into
the fiefdoms and robber barons of our time, looting resources, abusing
workers, and always obsessed with profit, profit, profit.
One
great moment – visually the best moment in the film –
shows a stack of legal documents in an office. The camera pulls
back, and it slowly reveals row after row of boxes and documents.
The room becomes a warehouse, and its sheer size overwhelms you.
The rows of shelves just go on and on.
You
watch all the evidence, and you listen to CEO’s, activists,
and progressive heroes like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomski, and you
end up feeling, well, helpless. The mood of The Corporation is almost
one of despair. There’s that sadness and anger you felt when
watching Fahrenheit, but this time you feel so much smaller,
almost helpless. What else can you feel when you realize that a
handful of international businesses will soon own the DNA to all
human life, and then all life on Earth? When you confront poisons
in our food, mass extinctions, and global warming, you have to wonder
if we even have a future.
Isn’t
this how the dinosaurs went extinct? Okay, that was the “Dinosaurs”
TV show, but still.
This,
I think, is where the filmmakers felt a need to change the tone.
They need to show something uplifting, something that can motivate
the audiences and inspire them to their cause. Abbott and Achbar
show us success stories and remind us of Gandhi and King and Civil
Rights and Women’s Rights; they show us activists and protestors
around the world who have fought for living wages, clean water,
resisting privatization of natural resources and genetically-modified
crops. And it just goes on and on and on.
I
suspect you understand my fatigue with The Corporation.
It isn’t the length that wore me down, but the sheer repetition
of it all. One of the basic rules of filmmaking is that you say
what you need to in the shortest time possible. This picture is
at least twenty minutes too long; I’d definitely drop the
last two or three reels, and trim the rest of the material. I just
felt like I was being clubbed over the head with a whiffle bat,
and I sympathize with these filmmakers. I believe in their cause.
I just don’t want to be preached at anymore. |
