"Inside Job"

If everything in the Charles Ferguson film "Inside Job" is true, the twenty-first century's collapse of the dollar might, at present and at best, have a spotty and elusive autobiography: one whose last chapter is yet to be written.

Surely Wall Street ran amok amid a new culture of deregulation in the 1980s, as told by Oliver Stone through the phoenix-like character Gordon Gekko across two films; "Inside Job" uses that history as foreground to the current collapse. Worth noting: these are fast and wild days, enough that 'temporary' documentaries, ones that retell a true story that the viewer may act accordingly and in a timely fashion, have come to garner enough attention as to be released and distributed by Sony, through Sony Pictures Classics.

There was a noble and animated attempt to explain the principles at work: subprime and predatory lending, derivatives, among many shots of the New York City skyline and helicopter views of massive office buildings. Surrounding the fall of Lehman Brothers, and its relationship with AIG, many names and faces swirled, from Reagan up to Rham Emmanuel and Obama: they're mostly all in on it, always have been, it seems. Hank Paulson's $700 billion bailout plea to Congress made logical sense, as does the recent international community's call for an end to a culture of bonuses in bank administration.

The film's incrimination of Columbia and Harvard was most striking: interestingly enough, while news of a sizable drug ring on Columbia's campus broke this morning, the other theater was running a flick on Ginsberg's formative trials regarding "Howl," a poem he wrote mostly in his dorm room at Columbia, until he was tossed out. "Inside Job" specifically charges Columbia's economics faculty with violating ethical standards, in preaching one thing in the classroom, and making money on the side doing something different. What's a documentarian to do with such a dead end: an injustice uncovered, an audience left with a massive issue unresolved.

There isn't much characterization of Treasury Secretaries; there isn't anything to laugh at, and almost nothing to be truly entertained by. Leaving the theater with the money in my wallet feeling more brittle and crisp-- as if it may evaporate-- I said a prayer for all the money-lenders, the teachers and the audiences. The Statue of Liberty, not a solution, closes the film, which left me with my hands in the air in disbelief, over shrugging my shoulders.