MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
**½/****
directed by Jim Bruce
THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI
***/****
directed by Bill Siegel
by Walter Chaw It's difficult to review Jim
Bruce's incendiary, scholarly Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (hereafter
Money), because even as I was understanding the role of the Federal
Reserve Bank for the first time in my adult life (how its adjustments of
interest actually drive the economy of not merely this nation, but every industrialized nation in our rapidly-shrinking world), I found myself comparing
the film to one of those informational videos that play on endless loops in
Natural History museums. It's immensely educational…and dry as a soda
cracker. What I find to be problematic about it is the same thing I found
problematic about Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth:
it's not really art, is it? Not to open that can of worms, but for me, as a
personal demarcation, art inspires something like Kierkegaardian fear and
loathing–existential trembling, yes: a mirror held to nature in all the
myriad, alien, surprising, often terrifying forms that nature assumes. What Money
does, and does admirably, is explain what the hell happened to the United
States' financial institutions right around 1998 or so and continuing on into
now–explain what the bailout was and how/why it affects the average
American. Most fascinatingly, it explains how far in estimation the once
god-like Alan Greenspan has fallen in the eyes of those who worshipped
him. But while these are noble achievements, they're not enough.
This isn't to say that multi-hyphenate Jim
Bruce doesn't try to spruce things up with clips from Harold Lloyd and Buster
Keaton to illustrate his points, although those clips are only fitfully
illustrative of the points he's trying to make. The movie's worst misstep is its use of a mushroom cloud as a visual corollary to the financial system's
recent implosion: it's not really the same thing, you know, and the image, I
fear, is evocative of a different kind of arrogance altogether. The irony of
that moment in Money is it's the sort of hyperbole that brought
the whole house down in the first place. Still, with its parade of Fed chairmen
past and present, of bankers who are somehow celebrities now, all talking
of warning signs missed and hubris indulged, Money works as a diary
of collapse, a time capsule if nothing more. Again like Gore's picture, it's
less a warning to be heeded than a statement for the record as Rome burns.
Ending with a quick, minute-long montage of possible solutions (education!
infrastructure!) that lands as almost laughable in our age of impenetrable
cynicism, Money is a good economics-cum-history class that's made me feel more informed if not particularly edified in any other way. See it, in other
words, as the cinematic equivalent of steel-cut oatmeal: good for you, but not delicious.
Then there's Bill Siegel's fascinating The
Trials of Muhammad Ali (hereafter Trials), which approaches Ali's
life from the perspective of his devotion to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of
Islam. It traces the public persecution of him for his
beliefs and reminds in a few key sequences of just exactly how mean, how very
vicious, Ali was towards opponents who refused to call him by his adoptive name.
Also wildly educational, the film features extraordinary archival footage of Malcolm X and
Ali speaking, verbally sparring, arrayed as antagonists eventually, with the
one breaking from the Nation of Islam and the other becoming its most conspicuous
proponent. It follows Ali's first, disastrous attempts at being a spokesman through to the refining of his patter, his confidence inflating in the public arena. I love
Siegel's sly paralleling of Ali's fight preparation with his growth as a human
being and a man of the world, beaten and brought low before emerging triumphant.
Interviews with second wife Belinda reveal a vulnerable Ali, injured by open
racism and the timeworn, never-out-of-style racist platitudes of "love it
or leave it," while brother Rahaman is thrillingly ambiguous as a guy
who's told his stories about his brother so many times that it's no longer
clear if he's still feeling what he's feeling, or just going through the
motions.
The best parts of Trials are the parts that meticulously document Ali's progress in the world–the parts where
Siegel inserts bits of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s sermons as counterpoint
to Ali's rhetoric and later intercuts King's ultimate support of Ali with news of
King's assassination. Its greatest triumph is eliciting empathy for the black
plight in America, then and now; it's easy to watch something like 12
Years a Slave and declare confidently that what white folks did to black
folks is wrong–a lot harder to create a sense of personal suture with
the rage and helplessness associated with racism through a protagonist painted
as deeply flawed and, at least initially, driven perhaps more by impulse than by consideration. Ali at the beginning of the movie is a young, charismatic guy
seduced into a system of belief. By the end, he's a sadder, still-charismatic
guy who, through the agency of this film, remains capable of influencing
thought and elevating the race conversation in this country by stripping away
its inanities–Paula Deen and her Arendt-ian supporters, for example. What
would she do in open debate/defense with Ali circa 1968? What is the proper response to a white woman seeing nothing wrong with fantasizing about an
all-black serving crew wearing white gloves just like in the good ol' days?
What, moreover, is wrong with her gaggle of mindless devotees? I would say that
what's wrong is that they've never been challenged in their lifetime by someone
like Muhammad Ali.
