Dir. Charles Ferguson , US, 2010, 109 mins
Cast: Matt Damon (narrator)
Review by Simona Gauri
When we think of finance many of us see a shapeless world of identical grey faces, busily engaged in doing things too difficult for us to understand. Some might recall the Men in Grey of Momo , a fantasy novel by Micheal Ende, published in 1973. And when we recall the financial crisis in 2008, the effects of which we are still living with, what comes to mind is the striking images of the victims of that crisis at the tent-camps in California, where thousands of Americans are forced to live because they cannot afford to pay for their home loans, rather than the indistinct faces of those Men in Grey.
Inside Job now shows us the true faces of the finance world by dispersing the grey fog of incomprehensibility, which veils the alien planet that is the world of finance. Director Charles Ferguson ( No End in Sight ) makes a brave choice by putting on the screen the real characters responsible of the global financial meltdown, which cost over $20 trillion and resulted in millions of people losing their jobs and homes.
Narrated by Academy Award winner Matt Damon, the film shows in a simple, captivating and ironic style the results of Ferguson’s extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists: from the rise of a rogue industry to the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia. Starting with landscape of Iceland, whose bankruptcy is taken as an example of small-scale financial breakdown, the spectator is at first captured by the beauty and tranquillity of this sparsely populated land and then launched at high speed into the skyscrapers of New York City in an increasingly fast-paced whirl of interviews, masterfully tailored and put together in clashing contrasts. It’s like a punch in the stomach: cynical faces telling half truths and blushing, when confronted with inconvenient questions and their own contradictions, like naked kings of a decadent empire.
The big merit of Ferguson’s film is the of breaking down of the wall, making the world of finance comprehensible, clearly explaining the frauds and briberies planned by the lords of finance and demonstrating that documentary fact is as powerful a tool as the fantasy of a feature film, when it comes to making the subject accessible to a lay audience.
As Ferguson himself claims, ‘This was a completely avoidable crisis. Indeed for 40 years after the reforms following the Great Depression, the United States didn’t have a single financial crisis. However, the progressive deregulation of the financial sector since the 1980s gave rise to an increasingly criminal industry, whose “innovations” have produced a succession of such crises. Each one has been worse than the last and yet, due to the industry’s increasing wealth and power, each crisis has seen few people go to prison.
‘In this case, nobody has gone to prison, despite fraud that caused trillions of dollars in losses. I hope that the film, in less than two hours, will enable everyone to understand the fundamental nature and causes of this problem’.
The problem extends outside this world of those offices, trading floors and computers, leading to massive drug consumption and prostitution, as shapely Kristin Davis, one of the only three female interviewees in the film (and better known at Wall Street as “Madam”), candidly confirms. No mystery in that: the finance world is a male world, with its faults and merits.
Far from being a puritan work, Inside Job is a general call for justice: ‘It is also my hope that, whatever political opinions individual viewers may have, that after seeing this film we can all agree on the importance of restoring honesty and stability to our financial system, and of holding accountable those who destroyed it,’ Charles Ferguson ends.
And I am sure that, after seeing “the cast”, you won’t easily forget the faces, voices and words of the Men in Grey (be they traders or politicians) such as Scott Talbott, George Soros, Frederic Mishkin or Davis McCormick…
