The Entertainer

Moore's starmaking apparatus was already in place in his first film, 1989's Roger & Me. It starts with home movies of the child Mike and his blue-collar family in their hometown of Flint, Mich., and follows the adult Mike as he stalks General Motors chairman Roger Smith in the hopes of confronting Smith for closing the auto plant in Flint and turning the city into a Hooverville. Along with critical praise, Moore earned charges of twisting the facts and distorting the sequence of events. Either way, the movie made him famous.

Now, in Capitalism, he's back outside the gates of GM--which, after declaring bankruptcy, was far less solvent than Moore. Talk about the little guy triumphing over the system: somehow, in the past 20 years, the free-enterprise system has been kinder to the agitprop indie filmmaker than to his auto-giant adversary. A man who made his career attacking corporate America has become a pretty big business himself.

Indeed, Moore is the General Motors--the old, powerful version--of the doc community. Other people make nonfiction political films, and good ones. Leslie and Andrew Cockburn's American Casino is a scrupulous study of the home-mortgage crisis; it shifts between Wall Street critics and the working-class folks whose lives were ruined as they lost their homes. But Casino, which plays like a superior edition of the PBS series Frontline, can now be seen in just a few theaters. It seems that doc films can thrive only if they star Michael Moore.

So audiences are attracted to and entertained by Moore--but what is the political effect of his star quality? In Capitalism, after cogently diagnosing the collusion of Wall Street and Congress in cooking this mess, he ends not by urging tough legislation but by calling for community activism and labor-union muscle. The problem is that movies, even Michael Moore movies, aren't an efficient method for rousing a constituency. Fahrenheit 9/11 didn't do half the damage to George W. Bush that the Swift Boat smears did to John Kerry. Sicko couldn't change lawmakers' minds on health care; a few shouters at town-hall meetings did.

No question that millions of people will see this film. Then they'll most likely remember Moore and forget about the bailout. Hey, folks, that's entertainment!