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Misery finds a lot of company in Cannes films
Despite the glamorous setting of the French Riviera, the movies that played at this year’s Cannes Film Festival portrayed a world that has hit rock bottom.
A washed-up movie promoter takes a group of New Burlesque stars to seedy French towns in Mathieu Almaric’s “On Tour.” A group of monks in Algeria are beheaded in Xavier Beauvois’ “Of Gods and Men.” A low-level Barcelona fixer learns he’s dying of cancer and ends up accidentally gassing a group of Chinese immigrants in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful.” A nanny is brutalized in Im Sangsoo’s “The Housemaid.” Hundreds of hoodlums are systematically executed in Takeshi Kitano’s “Outrage.” A grandmother tries to figure out how to respond to news that her grandson has been involved in a gang rape in Lee Chang-don’s “Poetry.” And an alcoholic woman watches her life pass by in Mike Leigh’s “Another Year.”
All of these movies are competing for the Palme d’Or, which will be awarded Sunday, May 23. But even movies screening outside the official competition had dark implications.
A marriage unravels in Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine,” starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. A nurse for terminal patients in an Hungarian hospital gorges on cream puffs in complete boredom as she watches a wall of heart monitors in “Pal Adrienn.” The world faces unimaginable apocalyptic dangers in Lucy Walker’s nuclear arms documentary “Countdown to Zero.” And if the world really comes to an end, we might all be so poor that we don’t even care, according to Charles Ferguson’s riveting Wall Street documentary, “Inside Job.”
Of all the movies screening at this year’s festival, “Inside Job” has to be the most outrageous, provocative and disturbing.
Ferguson, whose previous documentary was the war analysis “No End in Sight,” contends that Wall Street has become so corrupt that its stench has infected a complicit government as well as academia.
His ambition is monumental. He seeks to explain, in the simplest terms possible, how the financial meltdown of 2008 occurred, and who is to blame. Interviews include a who’s who of alleged economic experts, some of whom come off as being ethically bankrupt.
The basic premise is this: that the deregulation of financial markets that began in the 1980s has led to a series of meltdowns, each one getting progressively worse, and that both Republican and Democratic administrations have aided and abetted Wall Street criminals.
Ferguson is quite insistent on using the word “criminal.”
“I’m not against people making money,” he said in an interview. “But I think the ways of making money should be honest and that people should be doing something useful. That’s not the case with Wall Street. Businesses make real things, and they have to stand by what they make. Banks don’t make real things.”
Ferguson tracks much of the current financial problems to the unregulated financial innovations such as securitization of mortgages and speculative credit default swaps. If that sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, Ferguson wants to explain it. People buy houses, sometimes even when they can’t afford to. But banks and mortgage companies make the loans anyway because they get paid by commission. Then they sell those mortgages in bundles to investors.
The financial ratings agencies become complicit in the scheme, assigning high AAA ratings even to the riskiest of investments, including subprime mortgages. And Wall Street brokerages aggressively market these investments to clients, even though they know they are quite risky. In fact, these same Wall Street firms simultaneously invest in credit default swaps that will pay them handsomely if the securities they’re selling to their customers fail.
In short, the game is rigged, and Ferguson shows no deference to such power brokers in his interviews.
But Ferguson doesn’t stop there. He says business professors throughout the country supplement their incomes by writing reports favoring deregulation and then get paid to sit on executive boards that profit from deregulation.
He interviews Frederic Mishkin, a professor at the Columbia University Business School, and confronts him with payments he received from the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write a glowing report of that nation’s economic standing shortly before its financial collapse. Ferguson’s big complaint: that Mishkin didn’t disclose to investors that he was taking money from the Icelandic chamber.
Ferguson also corners Glenn Hubbard, the chief economic adviser during the George W. Bush administration and the current dean of Columbia Business School, as well as John Campbell, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Economics. Both end up being flustered and defensive as Ferguson details ethical conflict.
But Ferguson doesn’t stop there. He launches a full-scale attack on the Obama administration for what he sees as a business-as-usual approach, most vividly epitomized by two of his top economic advisers, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. When asked whether he thinks Obama will take any meaningful action to correct Wall Street excesses, Ferguson, who supported Obama in the 2008 election, answers with a flat “no.”
Ferguson said he was well aware that his movie was premiering in Cannes a day after Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” He declines, at first, to criticize Stone directly. “Let’s just say it’s a piece of Hollywood entertainment.”
But when pressed, Ferguson opens up, noting that Stone glamorizes the very world that he is supposedly attacking, using glowing shots of the New York skyline and all the accoutrements of wealth. Such glamorization led to the first “Wall Street” spawning an unintentional icon, the crooked character of Gordon Gekko. And throughout both movies, there’s a notion that Wall Street has a few bad characters among many honorable ones.
In interviews, Stone sounded more thoughtful than his movie did, wondering about the fate of capitalism itself.
“I am confused as to whether capitalism can still work,” he said. “I would love to see some serious reforms. After (the crash of) 1987, I thought it would cure itself, but it didn’t. And there’s still a tremendous inequity and injustice.”
But Ferguson still sees a problem with Stone’s stance.
“There’s an implication in Stone’s movie that this kind of criminal activity is done by a small number of people on Wall Street,” Ferguson said. “In fact, this criminal activity is done by a large number of people, with government and academic involvement.” Ferguson says he hopes “Inside Job” will help “demystify the current financial crisis. I think it’s essential that Americans understand so that they can take back their country.”
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