Moore Is Less

So Michael Moore has decided to take on the biggest issue of his career: the implosion of the world financial system. Come October, millions of us will shell out 12 bucks to be illuminated (in about 90 minutes) by the populist guru's take on the economic meltdown. The film does not yet have a title, but at the recent Cannes film festival, Moore offered a glimpse at the plot: "The wealthy," explained history's most successful nonfiction filmmaker, "at some point decided they didn't have enough wealth. They wanted more—a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money. Now, why would they do this? That is what I seek to discover in this movie."

That Moore, who is so skilled at luring in the evildoers and catching them on tape (though not quite as skilled as Sacha Baron Cohen, whose next movie addresses homophobia), would take on the villains of the financial industry should fill me with joy. Indeed, when I made Maxed Out, my take on the credit industry's rotting from within, three years ago I utterly failed in my numerous attempts to catch anyone on the record, save a couple of smarmy young turks in the debt-collection business. But the prospect of Moore taking on the nation's biggest and most dysfunctional industry fills me instead with a kind of dread, not just for the movie but for him personally. Not many details have been released about the angle his film will take but, from the way he describes it, there is a good chance not only that Moore will finally jump the shark but that he may have become that which he has derided so brilliantly over the years: a simplistic, didactic, one-note bully masquerading as the world's sheriff.

If his Cannes statements are representative of the film, "the wealthy," as Moore calls them, will face the brunt of his criticism—people like Sandy Weill, in many ways the mastermind of our current system, and pikers like Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff, who simply adapted an age-old scheme to an era when there was no one, or at least no one competent, looking over their shoulders. But blaming "the wealthy" (note to Moore: in a global sense, that means blaming most of America), individually or collectively, for our insane financial system or its inevitable bailout would be a distraction from a crisis that is far from over. Blaming the wealthy—or the greedy, whatever—misses the point. All you have to do is examine an earlier financial catastrophe: Enron.

As the ironically titled 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room demonstrates, the people in charge were not the smartest guys in the room at all, nor were they fat cats obsessed with becoming fatter cats. They were middle-class, insecure, arrogant, selfish and occasionally homophobic megalomaniacs blown up by Wall Street, by investors and, most of all, by the government's failure to keep them on a short leash. The most apt description of Enron—and of the current meltdown—comes from Kurt Eichenwald's brilliant blow-by-blow account of the company's collapse, Conspiracy of Fools.

Eichenwald didn't call his book Conspiracy of the Wealthy or Conspiracy of the Greedy for good reason: in many ways, the guys at the top were simply riding a wave of wishful thinking fueled by ineffective regulators, insufficient laws, corrupt ratings agencies, double-dealing bankers and, of course, millions of investors, from giant pension funds to Midwestern grannies, willing to play along as long as the stock continued to climb. If the guys at the very top really had been the most important perps, the prosecution of Kenneth Lay and the imprisonment of Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow might have mitigated, if not solved, the problem. Instead, the same denial-fueled wave that made Enron one of the most valuable companies in the world picked up speed and became the tsunami that demolished Wall Street.

"Why would they do this?" Moore asks about the wealthy evildoers, whetting our appetite for one more awful truth. It's a very interesting question. (Perhaps the answer is the worst possible reason: because they could.) But as much fun as it may be to think of guys like Madoff and Stanford and Richard Fuld being marched around in orange jumpsuits, or of drastically limiting their pay, going after those guys ignores the evil of a system that made the vast majority of the fraud perfectly legal. The most recent conspiracy of fools only worked because it made hundreds of millions of middle-class Americans feel as though they were among the same wealthy that Moore is preparing to crucify. Only now has a sense of betrayal set in, which is the one thing that Moore has on his side: populism.