Inside Job (2010)

Inside Job is the clearest and most comprehensive explanation I have seen of the origins of the recent global financial meltdown that has stripped millions of citizens worldwide of their life savings even as the powerful financiers who perpetrated the meltdown have walked away not only scot-free of criminal prosecution but with hundreds of millions of dollars in "executive compensation." From its A to B to C narrative, evenly intoned by Matt Damon and sustained by largely rational testimony throughout, to the movie's pervasive organization of ample information into well-designed graphics, Inside Job is a tour-de-force of clarity and a clarion call to action. It names (and, when possible, interviews) specific persons and implicates specific policies that contributed to and perpetuated the banking and mortgage industries' deregulation over the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations and interviews dozens of figures on both sides of the culpability aisle, all in nonpartisan fashion. Although neoconservatives and financial industry executives will likely grouse about how they come out in Inside Job, they are largely implicated by their own words or intransigence in congressional testimony as well as their duplicitous answers or failure to respond to simple ethical questions such as, "It's true that any citizen can walk into those hearings and state his or her opinion, but do you think that's on the same footing as your paying $700,000 to lobbyists to promote your views?" Because of the understated urgency and critical care with which it presents the evidence, I hope that Inside Job becomes this year's An Inconvenient Truth. While it will never convince the partisan minions who long ago took sides against ethical practices, societal welfare, and the American dream, I have for the past 12 years believed that rolling back deregulation and the corporate takeover of the American political system is the most pressing issue that confronts our freedom and our future. 5 stars. (11-30-2010, posted 3-3-2016)