Inside Job (2010)

Review

The Academy Award winning documentary of 2010, entitled Inside Job, is a hard-hitting and informative, but unfortunately biased and one-note film about the late 2000s financial meltdown in the United States. Director Charles Ferguson has said that his film is about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry", and for that focus, I would like to praise Inside Job. It does bring the corruption, greed and lack of regulations in this sector into focus, and Ferguson sheds light on many of the mechanisms and problems which were and are present in the interplay between a corrupt government, greedy financial institutions and an enticed market.

However, this is covered satisfyingly by the film's halfway point. And when Ferguson's lecture on the financial system is done, he starts pointing fingers by presenting an endless array of talking heads lured into being used as scapegoats. Whether they are guilty or not is not really that interesting, because the film isn't out to make human drama of culprits and victims; it is out to criticize a system which has allowed (borderline) criminal activity to take place. It is interesting in and of itself to hear how people in the midst of the action assess what happened, but namedropping opportunistic, greedy and potentially criminal people by the dozens doesn't make the film better. This is info which should be interesting for the police, not for film viewers who want dramaturgy and narrative. And when Ferguson brings in Wall Street madam Kristin Davis to talk about these people's use of cocaine and whores, the film descends to cheap sensationalism and loses a lot of my respect.