Inside Job doesn’t elucidate much about the 2008 American (and subsequent global) economic collapse that couldn’t have been gleaned from regular newspaper reading over the past two years. That simply means, however, that Charles Ferguson’s documentary is merely an exhaustively infuriating recap of the causes and effects of our country’s three decade-commitment to financial deregulation. As in No End in Sight, Ferguson’s subject is political but his approach is refreshingly apolitical, detailing without party bias the way in which Ronald Reagan’s decision to limit oversight on Wall Street and commercial banking slowly but surely led to systemic financial corruption. Ferguson’s documentary damns through thoroughness, detailing not only the rise of derivatives and similar risky products, but also banks’ efforts to simultaneously promote and bet against dodgy subprime mortgages and securities, a bonus structure that encouraged dicey decision-making for short-term gains, the habitual movement of players between the private and governmental realms, and a credit-rating and securities industry in collusion with the very companies they were supposedly policing. That the director’s non-fiction template is standard-issue – his format intersperses talking-head interviews with informative graphs and pie charts, all tethered together by clear-cut Matt Damon narration – may decrease the film’s glitziness. Still, the coherence and sobriety of this style bolsters its indictment, which is chockablock with confrontational chitchats with conflict-of-interest-flaunting academics (during part of a larger censure of university economics professors also seen to be in the pocket of the financial sector) and former Treasury and Federal Reserve bigwigs. Condemning a system that ran – and is still freely running – amok, Inside Job makes one mad as hell just by clearly and comprehensively making its case.
Comments