Directed by Charles Ferguson 12A cert, IMC Dún Laoghaire/Light House/Movies@Dundrum, Dublin, 108 min
This Oscar-nominated documentary explains the apocalyptic financial crash in terms sure to get the blood boiling, writes DONALD CLARKE
WHAT HAS shielded so many engineers of the 2008 financial catastrophe from prosecution, humiliation and mainstream opprobrium? Why have so few robber barons been carted to the stocks and pelted with last week’s turnips?
Yes, the judiciaries in many countries have dragged their feet. Sure, well-paid lawyers have deflected investigations. But the financiers’ most useful prophylactic has been the sheer complexity of the story. Anybody can fume about excessive bankers’ bonuses; it requires more study to work up fury about the financial rating agencies’ inappropriately generous assessment of certain credit default swaps. (Please don’t write in if I’ve got that wrong.)
So hats off to Charles Ferguson for his endlessly gripping, blackly funny study of the financial apocalypse. His is not the first effort to disentangle the mess on screen. The 2009 BBC TV series The Love of Moneycovered the same ground in equally lucid style. An episode of The Ascent of Money, made for Channel 4, also did fine work in demystification. But Inside Job packs the information into a well-structured package that works like an old-school conspiracy thriller. Not for nothing is it the current odds-on favourite for the best feature documentary Oscar.
Ferguson’s cleverest move comes with the opening prologue. We begin in Iceland. In 10 short minutes, various experts explain how, over the space of a few years, deregulation of the nation’s financial institutions led the country from relaxed quasi-Scandinavian security to a state of pan-handling desperation. The last shot finds one sage noting that something similar happened in New York City. Cue credits. The compact Icelandic example serves as a road map for the epic tale that follows.
Ferguson is, alas, not averse to the odd thumping cliche. Those credits play out to the too-obvious strains of Peter Gabriel's Big Time, and we are never more than two minutes away from an aerial shot of a looming skyscraper.
Never mind. The director of the Oscar-nominated No End in Sightis so adept at organising his talking heads that the occasional clunky moment is easy to overlook. Not everybody agreed to appear on screen, of course. At the press show this writer attended, there were snorts of derision each time it was announced that someone "refused to be interviewed for this film".
The bandits may have made the smart decision. More than a few participants are profoundly humiliated by the questioning. It is depressingly appropriate that Frederic Mishkin, former adviser to the Fed and current professor at Columbia Business School, seems particularly uninformed on some fairly basic facts.
The story that emerges is one of rampaging carelessness as much as shameless villainy (though there’s plenty of that). Too much faith was invested in a ballooning property market. Too much focus was placed on rewarding financial professionals over maintaining long-term stability. Ferguson’s argument, however, is that all these problems have their roots in the Reagan administration’s determination to deregulate Wall Street.
If the picture paints Republican politicians as proactive wreckers, it is happy to label the Democrats as passive collaborators. The final section, recalling Animal Farm, reminds us that many of the economic Visigoths who brought chaos to the markets still have access to Obama’s White House.
Noting the film’s convincing depiction of Sam Wall Street as a centre of personal as well as professional immorality (a brothel keeper even makes an appearance), one leaves with the impression that the financial casino is regarded by Washington as an evil necessary for economic growth. Didn’t they once said that about the slave trade?
