The Corporation

Maybe because there is something inoffensively Canadian about the production, I find this left-wing rallying cry much more palatable than the efforts of that pinko walrus Michael Moore, who actually figures prominently in this film as well. He appears as talking head, along with the usual suspects, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, etc., as well as fresh faces like Naomi Klein, whose book No Logo I am in the middle of reading. But much more striking were voices such as the classic CEO who had an ecological epiphany and shifted his company’s course toward sustainability, or the little Indian physicist in a sari who led a movement against the self-terminating seeds of agribusiness. There are lots of others as well, which satisfyingly fill the 2:25 running time. Antic editing keeps the whole lesson moving along briskly and amusingly. The basic premise is to take the 19th century legal fiction that the corporation is a person, and examine just what sort of person it might be. It’s a bit glib to diagnose the corporation as a psychopath, but basically accurate. This documentary is “fair and balanced” in the grand tradition of Fox News, but from the other side of Alice’s wonderland mirror. But point by point was well taken. I was particularly struck by how Gilded Age lawyers seized upon the 14th amendment to free the person the corporation claimed to be from the “slavery” of government regulation. I’m somewhat bemused by the way the film becomes a marketing brand of its own, but wonder how else to sell the case for social change? (2004, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-73, RT-91.)