Uncle Miltie shows up at the end to give the obligatory laissez-faire solution to the problem, and there's some slight sniping at Chomsky. Otherwise, nothing in the review to serious challenge the film's thesis.
======================================================================== ==== Familiar Villain Emerges In Dark Documentary Film
By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN and DENNIS K. BERMAN Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL May 6, 2004; Page B1
CEOs in handcuffs march across the screen. Bolivians riot in the streets to wrest control of their drinking water away from a business consortium. Cows with inflamed udders walk by, allegedly harmed by growth hormones. Even Kathy Lee Gifford appears, expressing her dismay that child laborers made clothes sold under her label.
The scenes unfold in "The Corporation," a Canadian documentary creating a stir with an unusually harsh critique of big business. Between vignettes, the screen fills with a white page from the World Health Organization's Manual of Mental Disorders. A big red check mark appears next to symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, or psychopathic behavior. Soon, all the boxes are checked off -- from "callous unconcern for the feelings of others" to "an incapacity to maintain enduring relationships."
On screen, Robert Hare, a psychiatrist who consults on psychopaths for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, concludes: "In many respects, corporations are the prototypical psychopath."
It's an exceedingly dim view of modern companies, and it has helped a Canadian documentary win the kind of international momentum most independent filmmakers only dream of. Since opening in Toronto in January, "The Corporation," which took six years and nearly $1 million to make, has packed theaters in Canada and broken domestic box-office records for a homegrown documentary. It has aired on TVOntario, the broadcaster that helped bankroll the film. It won the Documentary Audience Award for World Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and is set to open in 19 U.S. cities next month. Distribution deals are lined up for Europe, Japan and Australia; a tie-in book was published in March.
After three years of corporate scandals and executive prosecutions, "The Corporation" is only the latest movie to put big business on the barbecue. Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" skewered the U.S. gun culture, the defense industry and the media, and it went on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature last year. "Super Size Me," a low-budget film diary of one man's experience eating exclusively at McDonald's for one month, is set to open tomorrow on 37 screens, an unusually wide release for such a film.
"Documentaries are more exciting than canned fictional stories," says Alex Gibney, a filmmaker who is writing and directing his own entry in the genre, a documentary on Enron Corp. called "Black Magic" that is set to be released later this year.
"The Corporation" is a 145-minute fusillade of clips of present-day newscasts and interviews, juxtaposed with old black-and-white newsreel footage, corporate ads and cartoons. Painstakingly edited down from hundreds of hours of raw material by the film's third creator, Jennifer Abbott, it is a fast-moving collage, an ironic, surreal visual riff.
Parts are funny. One sequence that gets a laugh features a string of talking heads pronouncing the words, "Bad apple." Other sections are more pious. "What kind of a person is the corporation?" a woman's voice asks, at one point. A faceless man answers, "Persons who have no moral conscience."
Joel Bakan, a 44-year-old Canadian law professor, and Mark Achbar, a 48-year-old Canadian filmmaker, came up with the idea to illustrate how corporations have supplanted the government and the church as the dominant societal institution. Mr. Bakan was intrigued with the U.S. legal idea that corporations are like people, with rights to borrow money, buy and sell property and sue in court.
Predictably, the premise delights Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and long-time anticapitalist activist who appears in the film. "This is the first time I've heard the word 'psychopath' applied to corporations," he said in an interview, "and it's exactly right."
But others don't care for it. Toronto's Financial Post called the movie an "evil, ugly and dishonest pack of lies" by "cultural welfare recipients." The Winnipeg Free Press gave the film 3½ stars out of a possible five, taking the film to task for its "unremitting grimness," adding that it "might not be enough to get audiences out of the shopping malls and onto the streets."
Most of the companies mentioned in the movie declined to comment because they hadn't seen it. Pfizer Corp. comes off relatively unscathed. The film crew interviewed a vice president about the company's community involvement, including the donation of turnstiles at a subway station and an security intercom. The executive pushes a button to demonstrate and gives a huge smile. Nobody answers.
Bryant Haskins, a Pfizer spokesman, says executives haven't seen the movie, but he bought the book. "Had we known that this was about portraying the corporation as a psychopath, we wouldn't have cooperated," he says.
Still, the movie has found its audience. The University of Western Ontario's business school has made "The Corporation" the subject of a study group. A business school in the South of France, the Theseus International Management Institute, last month screened the film at its annual alumni conference and flew Mr. Bakan in to speak. "There is a very important change taking place in what society expects of the corporation," says Ahmet Aykac, the school's director. "We assigned rights and privileges yet none of the moral constraints of physical persons."
Actually, "The Corporation" does have a hero: Ray Anderson, chairman of Interface Inc., an Atlanta rug maker whose shares trade on the Nasdaq stock market. The movie shows Mr. Anderson close to tears while confessing that he was a "plunderer" of the Earth. A few years ago, he read Paul Hawkens's "The Ecology of Commerce," an indictment of modern industry's effect on the environment. Interface, with $924 million in sales and 5,500 employees, began recycling and taking other steps to protect the environment.
"The film makes us look pretty good, doesn't it?" Mr. Anderson says. When he showed up at a question-and-answer session after the Sundance screening in Salt Lake City, he got a standing ovation.
At one point in the film, Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, makes an appearance. "A corporation is simply an artificial legal structure," Dr. Friedman says in the film, "but the people who are engaged in it -- whether the stockholder, whether the executives in it, whether the employees -- they all have moral responsibilities."
In an interview, Dr. Friedman disagreed with Mr. Bakan's notion that more regulations are needed for corporations to behave more ethically. "The problem is that we have too much regulation, not too little," Dr. Friedman said. "The best punishment for a corporation is open competition."