In the case of Casino, which the director produced and wrote with her husband Andrew Cockburn, the problem is less that there is lack of a conservative viewpoint and more a lack of ambition. Wall Street and lenders are given a wicked lashing and the overwhelmingly African-American victims of their dealings are given a vast sounding board, but societal and philosophical concepts are only skirted. How the current economy and the subprime mortgage scandal reflect on capitalism, race relations, and the American dream are mentioned only in passing.
Our touchstone, financial reporter Mark Pittman, begins the film by delving into the surpassingly complex workings of the mortgage market and how it becomes what he calls the 'Street's casino.' Cockburn interviews an array of financial experts including an erstwhile Bear Stearns employee, masked for protection and to bolster the film's view of Wall Street as a den of criminals. Some simply refer to borrowers as 'idiots' but others are eager to study how the housing market, like medicine and food, has become a business based on exceeding profits.
Footage of Alan Greenspan's infamous Congressional testimony, where he admitted his ideology was 'flawed,' and Phil Gramm's reprehensible characterization of his critics as a 'nation of whiners' are starter pistols, but Cockburn's film is most effective on a trip to Baltimore. A homeless reverend, an evicted young father of three, and a grandmother trying a last-ditch effort to save her home personify and ground the fiscal woes and help explain the racist implications of the mortgage market. Elsewhere, Riverside, California provides the freshest corpse of the recession. Surrounded by moral and social decay that is almost as harrowing as Michael Moore's Flynt, Michigan, a Riverside pest controller worries over how the recession might lead to an outbreak of West Nile.
At one point, a lender admits that they would do anything to close on a subprime mortgage, not only because of the monetary positives but also because they are allowing someone to buy a house and therefore realize their American dream. The latter notion seems to be directly contradicted by the fact that many of those who received subprime mortgages would have been eligible for regular mortgages -- a fact the film briefly points out but does little to explore. This selling of the American dream is a sizable component of how the subprime scandal got going, but it is generally disregarded in favor of the emotional heave of Riverside. Like the recent Food Inc., Casino works as an excellent primer on the topic but generally disregards the implicit roots of the current economic crisis. It's an angry film for an angry country, which may be all we are capable of dealing with, considering the wound is still gaping.
