Escape from planet ghetto

It’s the mid-22^nd century and disease and pollution have driven the 1%—or, given the overpopulation, more likely the .001%—into space, where they live on a pretty spinning wheel called Elysium, get plenty of artificial daylight and receive medical attention from all-purpose healing beds that can eradicate a cancer or perform massive reconstructive surgery in seconds. Meanwhile, somewhere in a sprawling shantytown called Los Angeles, a paroled ex-criminal named Max (Matt Damon) works the assembly line in a factory that produces the very robot cops that routinely beat the shit out of him. One day Max’s asshole foreman tells him to fix a glitch and winds up giving him radiation poisoning that’ll kill him in five days. So Marx finds his old Chicano gang, who run a coyote operation that takes illegals to Elysium—this is, among other things, a border-crossing movie and a plea for universal health care—and insists that he gets put on the next flight. The gang boss says Max can go so long as he performs a wildly dangerous “data heist,” which means kidnapping a top-ranking Elysian and draining his brain of all sorts of codes that can be used to start a revolution, or something. To prepare Max for his mission the gangsters provide him with an exoskeleton that turns him into a fleshier Robocop.

If that strikes you as a lot of synopsis already, trust me, that ain’t nothing. Part of the problem with Neil Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9 is that it’s overloaded with plot. What Elysium does well are the big, broad concepts and the action bits; things like details or character development, not so much. Elysium spends a lot of time on secondary characters, yet all of them—Jodie Foster’s evil, leaden secretary of defense most of all—remain boringly one-dimensional. Not that Max is all that nuanced. Damon has a knack for bringing an unlikely soulfulness to his action roles, but Max is humourless and the script’s one stab at endowing him with psychological need is a shopworn trope that has Max longing to go to Elysium since childhood. We get this information not from anything Max says or does but rather from gauzy, corny flashbacks that, like much of the subplot material, are extraneous and make the film drag, right up to its nonsensically hopeful ending. 

             

Inside Job: Wall Street Blues

Perhaps it takes one to know one when we’re talking about buckets of money. Charles Ferguson made a bundle selling Vermeer Technologies to Microsoft in the mid-90s, and thereafter opted for research, writing, entrepreneurship, and finally filmmaking, over expanding his yacht collection or trying his hand at arms manufacturing. He last gave us the highly valuable No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, but I think Inside Job might be the movie he was destined to make, a wide-ranging analysis of the 2008 economic collapse that opens with a title card that declares: “This is how it happened.” I’m in no position to verify Ferguson’s ballsy assertion, but it would be my pleasure to direct you to the theatre where he’s laying it all out for your scrutiny.

If you’re as essentially ignorant about the finer points of financial swindling as I am, rest assured that Inside Job functions as a solid crash course in how markets crash, while those responsible walk away from the disaster in only cozier positions of power and influence. Ferguson’s investigation into the roots of deregulation under Reagan and how it was merrily maintained by every presidency from then on is sufficiently thorough as to reawaken one’s indignation over just how low Wall Street accountability has fallen over the last 30 years. Darting between a few dozen talking heads representing just about every point on the political spectrum—including disgraced former New York attorney general and governor Eliot Spitzer, the altogether enlightening subject of another new documentary called Client 9, which we’ll hopefully see turning up soon—Ferguson conjures an insane parade of predatory loans, $1,000 an hour prostitutes, multi-million dollar bonuses, lobbyists making colossal campaign contributions, Alan Greenspan getting paid $40,000 for a letter of support for Charles Keating’s dodging of the Federal Home Loan Bank’s ten percent rule—that being just one of countless examples of such advocacy—and, as we steer toward the aftermath, President Obama’s failure to do anything about any of it.

For all those who opted to appear in Inside Job there are numerous conspicuous absentees, such as AIG’s Joseph Cassano, Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld, former Goldman Sachs CEO and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and, obviously, Greenspan. The refusal of so many lowdown higher-ups to be interviewed could have discouraged a different sort of filmmaker, but Ferguson turns it into a running joke. Not a cheap joke, mind you. Ferguson strives to engage and entertain by infuriation, but he isn’t interested in Michael Moore’s shenanigans or sweeping ideological condemnations, which means that Inside Job is a vastly more lucid indictment of American greed than Capitalism: A Love Story.

Ferguson’s cinematic style is slick, sometimes excessively so. Architecture emerges as his favoured storytelling device, the fortress-like skyscrapers that symbolize inaccessibility and decadence, the helicopter overhead shots of cities that incite vertigo. It’s a workable and kinetic if not especially original convention. It shows his visual imagination to be stronger than that brought to the movie’s soundscape. Matt Damon supplies a pleasingly sober narration, but Alex Heffes’ score alternately invokes boilerplate corporate thrillers and gladiator movies and in any case occasionally spills over the top. This weightiness is somewhat balanced by familiar frat rock classics like ‘Big Time,’ ‘New York Groove,’ and the almost obligatory ‘Takin’ Care of Business.’

director Charles Ferguson

At times you wonder if a 90-miute movie is really the best way to present this material, yet the format can arguably reach audiences who are by now glazing over news and magazine pieces on the recession. Ferguson, to his credit, takes care not to snow layman viewers. He surely had to fight the temptation to pile on more data since he’s so obviously better versed in the nitty-grit than most of us. Bottom line: Inside Job gets your attention, and ultimately rewards it. The question is: what happens next?

The Informant!: Matt Damon spills the beans, then the rice, and just keeps going

The exclamation point decorating the title of The Informer! gives us a helpful nudge from the get-go that where we’re going is going to be plenty goofy. It’s not a musical, but it is in one sense a hell of a song and dance. As imagined by obscenely productive director Steven Soderbergh and Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, this filmic realization of investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 nonfiction book of the same name—sans flamboyant punctuation—is less a corporate thriller than it is a punchy comic meditation on greed, compulsion, and manipulation. Mark Whitacre, the agri-business executive who secretly collaborated with the FBI in a campaign against his employers on charges of price fixing back in the mid-1990s, would have made a perfectly fascinating subject for a more conventional sort of white-collar crime movie. But Soderbergh and Burns have gone way out on a limb in terms of tone and narrative focus to render him a figure that’s at once enigmatic and strangely intelligible. They’ve taken some pretty crazy risks, and the risks pay off as terrifically audacious entertainment with a toothy social slant.

A large part of the credit for why this all works so well should go to Matt Damon, who in films like The Departed, The Good Shepherd and the Bourne franchise has nurtured a niche for himself via his remarkable talent for twisting his own boyish charisma into perverse shapes. His Whitacre is a golf-loving, Wal-Mart-clad, mustachioed Midwesterner, an imminently cheerful husband and father of three with a big, ugly suburban house and eight—count ’em—eight cars. Even his tics, such as his habit of constantly adjusting his glasses, feel so utterly normal and trustworthy. He approaches the feds as a guy who just wants to do the right thing, so naïve that he thinks he’ll actually become the company’s new CEO once all the fuss blows over and his current bosses are behind bars. But his innocence is always undercut by his evident intelligence. As he keeps reminding everyone, he is the only guy who knows the science and the business side of things at Archers Daniels Midland. He’s someone capable of big things.

The Informant!’s most winning distinction lies in what we’re able to gather of Whitacre’s private thoughts and obsessions. The use of voice-over is inspired. Rather than function in the past-tense as a way of conveying exposition or foreshadowing, Whitacre’s disembodied voice comes to us as present-tense reportage direct from his easily distracted brain, a series of frequently hilarious digressions into deceitful butterflies, polar bear camouflage, German words, and time-saving techniques, into ideas for TV shows about doubles and story of a man who drops dead upon realizing that the man across from him is wearing a tie with the same pattern—but in reverse. These interruptions are brilliantly timed and only seem like non-sequiturs until you gradually detect a pattern evolve that speaks, however obliquely, to Whitacre’s peculiar pathology, his desire to lead a double life. He’s a strange man, one who needs to talk, and listening to him let loose as the contradictions in his claims accumulate to preposterous degrees is an awful lot of fun.