Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2020)
dir. Justin Pemberton
Rated: N/A
image: ©2020 Kino Lorber
“The problem is concentration of ownership…” The entirety of French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument about what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it can be boiled down to those six words. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, and Piketty’s nearly 700-page examination of wealth and income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, goes into exhaustive detail on the subject. It was published in the original French in 2013, and the English translation released in 2014 reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list a month after publication. New Zealander filmmaker Justin Pemberton has turned the tome into an eye-opening, and at times a rather eye-popping, new documentary.
Using Piketty’s book as the source material, the documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century draws a straight line from the eighteenth-century European aristocracy’s stranglehold on wealth to our current situation where one percent of the population controls 70% or more of the world’s monetary resources.
The first half of the film acts as history lesson. Piketty and others specializing in economic history explain the rigid class system in Europe at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. One interviewee, using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an example, explains that the wealthy Mr. Darcy would never have married someone like the penniless Elizabeth Bennet. Money married money, period. Marriage had nothing to do with love, but served as a way to consolidate and build more wealth. That made a person’s station in life dependent on the accident of birth and inheritance. It also made being born into poverty a death sentence that could never be escaped.
The discovery and colonization of the new world led to a brief period of hope for the lower classes to escape the heavily stratified class system of the old world. Then the elites got wise to what they were missing. They introduced the slave trade and began building empires that rivaled and expanded those in Europe.
Capital’s one shortcoming is how it peripherally deals with race and inequality. The way the section explaining how vast wealth was built on the backs of black slaves in America barely scratches the surface. The part of the film that deals with the post-World War II era, in which the middle class made the greatest gains in terms of economic equality, is another example. The history of black and brown communities being systemically shut out of these gains amounts to a throwaway line or two in the documentary.
That doesn’t, however, detract from the power of the movie’s overall message. In the second half of the picture, Piketty and others, like Joseph Stiglitz, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, walk us through the gains the middle class made in the 1950s and ‘60s. The Great Depression and World War II had decimated the world’s workforce and infrastructure. Through policies like FDR’s New Deal and the Marshall Plan, progressive taxation of the richest one percent redistributed resources, allowing for the flourishing of a new, strong middle class.
Then, in the 1970s, a series of complex factors culminated in an economic crisis, and the wealthy class seized the opportunity to roll back the gains of the middle class in order to pocket more for themselves. They did this through the Reagan Revolution in America and in Britain by way of the class traitor Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was the daughter of a middle-class grocer and she turned her back on labor when she became Prime Minister.
Director Justin Pemberton documents all of this with a flashy style and a very cinematic look. He uses film history itself as a means to visually represent Piketty’s ideas. Early in the film, Piketty mentions that he believes film, literature, and art can work to teach us about the ways in which economic inequality impacts those at the bottom of society. Pemberton runs with that sentiment and weaves clips from films like A Tale of Two Cities, Les Misérables, The Grapes of Wrath, Wall Street and the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice into his movie. The most striking use of archival film clips comes from Godfrey Reggio’s brilliant 1982 experimental film Koyaanisqatsi.
Pemberton also uses distinctive stylistic flourishes to complement the most fascinating – and disheartening – sequence of Capital. Paul Piff, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine describes an experiment he conducted in which different groups of two test subjects were brought in to play the board game Monopoly. Based on the random flip of a coin before each game started, one subject was designated the “rich” player and the other was designated the “poor” player.
The rich player in each test was given unfair advantages over the poor player. The rich player was given more money at the start of the game. The poor player was allowed to use only one die to move around the board, whereas the rich player could use both dice. This made it easier for the rich player to acquire property and pass “GO” more often, which meant more opportunities to collect two hundred dollars.
What Piff found in these experiments – besides the fact that the rich player often became pitiless within minutes of the start of play – was that not one single rich player attributed their success in the game to that initial flip of the coin going their way. They felt they had earned their good fortune.
Thomas Piketty is afraid the top one percent are using their wealth to rig the economic and political systems to their advantage. He thinks we are returning to a society more like the one that existed in the eighteenth century, where wealth is passed down generation after generation while those outside of that elite bubble are destined to toil in relative poverty.
He lays out a plan for progressive taxation on the millionaire and billionaire class that would create a more equitable society. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a brilliant translation of Piketty’s ideas to a visual medium. It is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand how things came to be this way and how we can change our situation for the better.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Full disclosure: I was pretty much in the bag for this one from the start. Economic inequality is a subject I’m very passionate about, and Thomas Piketty’s ideas are ones I find extremely convincing. Short of the documentary being completely inept (it definitely is not), I was pretty much bound to love this. It was easy to have a clear conscience about it, because Pemberton’s film is genuinely engaging and well-made.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Craziest fact from the movie: In mid-19th century Britain, it was illegal to quit a job without permission. You could be arrested for it.
- There is a brief sequence that ties the fashion and Christmas (gift giving) industries together as inventions of the mid-19th century as a way to encourage mindless consumerism. Spoiler alert: it worked.
- One of the best, truest quotes from the movie: “The sentiment of ‘What’s good for Wall Street is good for Main Street’ has never been true.”
- I won’t try to get into the details here, but Piketty (and the film) lay out a brilliant plan to fight the scourge of tax havens.
- Most stark statistic from the movie: Since the 1970s, in China, the average increase in personal wealth for the bottom 99% of the population has been 800%. That sounds great, until you hear that the same increase for the top 1% for the same period has been 2000%.
- The most pernicious idea exposed in the movie (certainly not for the first time): The idea (which has especially taken root in America) that you’re not poor, you’re just a millionaire-in-waiting. That has led to people voting against their own self-interests because they’ve been fooled into believing something that will never happen (by design).
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Week nine. All movie theaters in Dallas are taking appropriate caution and staying closed despite our state government leaders doing everything they can to ensure infection rates start surging again. Our household plan is to keep on keeping on until at least the beginning of June. Stream on! I was able to rent Capital in the Twenty-First Century through the US distributor, Kino Lorber. They have entered into a deal where streaming rentals through their website will benefit the theaters the movies would have played in if they were open.