'Capitalism: A Love Story'

Say what you like about Michael Moore, he certainly knows how to pick his subjects. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was so au courant about the invasion of Iraq it won the 2004 Palme d'Or at Cannes, and 2007's "Sicko" got the jump on the current healthcare imbroglio. Now, barely a year after the Wall Street meltdown, "Capitalism: A Love Story" examines, in typical love-it-or-leave-it Moore fashion, the causes of the collapse of the century.

"Capitalism" is not just Moore's latest documentary, it is, as the filmmaker himself has said, "the movie I've been making for the past 20 years." He lays the ills of American society that he's chronicled over all that time at the feet of an out-of-control free-market system he so detests that he puts priests on camera to talk about capitalism as morally evil.

Clearly, Moore has not lost his provocateur's gift for stirring the pot, and it is heartening to have a filmmaker take on a subject this all-encompassing and almost taboo. But not even Moore's skill can quell the suspicion that "Capitalism" misses the narrower focus that gave his earlier films some of their punch.

In a sense, "Capitalism" comes by its wide-ranging, scattershot approach naturally. After all, this is a heck of a big subject: Just ask Karl Marx, who spent 18 years researching and writing his multi-volume "Das Kapital." So it's perhaps inevitable because of the ton of territory "Capitalism" covers that this film ends up as the sum of its parts, nothing more.

That said, Moore's scattershot is a lot more interesting than some filmmakers' focus, and many of those individual parts are classic. For one thing, Moore retains the instincts of a shrewd stand-up comedian -- the astonished, baffled looks he often wears are a case in point, as is his decision to include under the rubric of "When did Jesus become a capitalist?" the dubbing of a section of a biblical epic with free-market platitudes.

And Moore has not lost his zest for confrontational antics. He asks New York financial workers to explain derivatives, drives an armored car up to AIG corporate headquarters and demands the company return federal bailout funds, even surrounds all of Wall Street with yellow "crime scene" tape to emphasize his low opinion of the area's activities.

One of the things that is new about "Capitalism" is an emphasis on the filmmaker's personal life. He talks about how, inspired by Daniel Berrigan, he wanted to be an activist priest, and he goes with his dad to the site of the former AC spark plug plant in Flint, Mich., -- now a vacant lot -- where his father spent satisfying decades as a union-protected assembly-line worker.