Capitalism: A Love Story

This love story lands amid a crisis that’s been dubbed The Great Recession, and Moore’s talent for on-time arrivals gives the movie a lot of its kick. But the subject is so vast that what ultimately Moore intends to achieve is vague. After opening with an amusingly juxtaposed montage of clips depicting life in ancient Rome mixed with highlights of the Bush administration (them again), the movie finds a couple of nice families whose homes are being foreclosed upon. It introduces us to a gentleman who spends his days promiscuously snatching up such repossessed properties.

Moore delves into a Wal-Mart life-insurance scandal in which the company profits from dead employees. He shares a city bench with a former Wall Street whiz who has an impossible, if hilarious, time trying to explain certain financial instruments. He visits with Marcy Kaptur, a congresswoman from Ohio, who has called the government’s bailout of failing banks a crime perpetrated against the American people. Along the way, Moore continues to whack at the Bush administration, which, for his purposes, is like a piñata that will never stop raining candy.

These encounters, and others in which Moore parts the curtain on his Michigan childhood, certainly stoke the movie’s editorial fire. But the filmmaking doesn’t build into a greater whole. “Capitalism’’ lacks the epic human scope of “Bowling for Columbine,’’ the rage of “Fahrenheit 9/11,’’ and the farce of his most underrated outing, “Sicko.’’ This one feels diffuse, even for Moore.

Part of the problem may be the fault of the economy itself. Had Moore waited for real improvement - well, who knows when we’d see the movie. Yet a narrower political universe, like gun control, for instance, allows Moore’s roving imagination to make surprising observations, to exhaust the subject. Here the hugeness appears to have wiped him out.