Inside Job (Documentary) – If you hadn’t lived through the financial meltdown of 2008-09, you would have thought Michael Moore created Inside Job, an anything but objective look at the characters and their policies that led to the housing and market crash that isn’t over yet. Director/Producer Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight) places blame squarely on the incestuous financial industry itself and the greed of the executives who developed unsustainable financial instruments that made money readily available and created an international Ponzi scheme. The film attempts to explain the terms that have become staples of the media but that consumers don’t understand. As most biased documentaries in the Moore vein, Inside Job doesn’t pretend to portray the nuances or to ascribe any redeemable motives to its vilified targets. It implies conspiracy among the executives of the banks and securities firms, the rating agencies, the government officials who had come from the industry itself, university business schools deans and professors who are on the take, and regulators. The film’s basic premise is that too much power was centered in too few people that were aided and abetted by the Administrations of at least three Presidents. If the meltdown hadn’t actually happened and affected us all, we might be inclined to dismiss Inside Job as a hatchet job. Well it is that but, as you watch, you are inclined to believe most of it … and indulge the excesses.
Matt Damon narrates the film, ostensibly to provide it with star power. There could have been better narrators. Damon is great but he doesn’t have a narrator’s voice. Whenever your narrator is an actor, the audience should be wary of their own political agenda. But thankfully, Inside Job places blame on Republicans and Democrats alike (okay, there is a bit more Republican bashing but even Obamaites will not be pleased either). Essentially, Ferguson asserts that the very people that caused the crisis or failed to investigate it – Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson, Larry Summers, etc. – are the people still in charge. Inside Job is biased but it is also food for thought. As an audience, you sure don’t feel sorry for the financial executives who either wouldn’t talk to the filmmaker or who were stupid enough to be interviewed (and made to look like fools). But you do walk away shaking your head that we were all unwitting victims of a system run amok.