Week 8: The Inside Job
Dir. Charles Ferguson
2010. 120min
The Study, Teviot
This is not a detached analysis of the 2008 financial meltdown in the United States; it is an angry film determined to prove a point. The idea is this: What some have called the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was a direct and inevitable consequence of the way Wall Street’s investment banks conducted business for years and was thus entirely avoidable. Many times, Ferguson can be heard from behind the camera halting a subject’s answer with the incredulous phrase, “You can’t be serious.”
That said, the picture is well argued, and succeeds in making some sense out of a series of complex mortgage scams deliberately designed to make millions by defrauding investors. Mortgages were pushed and sold to people who could not afford them. The institutes carrying these worthless loans then turned around and bet against them so that when the mortgages failed, fortunes were made. And those are only the broadest strokes.
Ferguson’s on-camera subjects range from politicians, journalists, and academics—all of them from fields corrupted by this poisoned financial climate—to a psychiatrist and even a Wall Street madam, who describes a culture of entitlement and instant gratification—through pervasive spending on cocaine and prostitutes—and its staggering expense. This is where the film’s real strength lies. Corrupt traders on Wall Street no longer shock people. It is very old news. That the biggest and most powerful financial institutions in America had created an entire culture of deliberate fraud on a mammoth scale is, sadly, not shocking either, but it does provoke anger.
Moving briskly from cause to effect to consequence, Inside Job is an undisguised work of moral outrage.
Winner of the 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Narrated by Matt Damon.
Written by Mr Phil