Shared Darkness

It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the global financial meltdown of 2008, a tsunami that, if we were lucky, a lot of us felt as a pinch or a slap. The additional wallop that Charles Ferguson’s revelatory new documentary Inside Job packs comes from what it augurs for the future, and how it reveals the collapse to be both at once a crime of greed and an entirely systemic (if sadly preventable) failure, a de-pantsing of American capitalism to the rest of the world.

The word “empathy” was derided in some quarters of political discourse when President Obama mentioned it in 2009 in the context of a necessary ingredient of a Supreme Court justice, but clearly there isn’t that sort of honest feeling for constituents and the public at large in so many of those charged with protecting the interests of average Americans. Narrated by Matt Damon and told in breathtakingly concise, calmly reasoned strokes, the ire-evoking Inside
Job makes this abundantly clear. In his follow-up to No End in Sight, Ferguson rivetingly connects the dots on the shadowy financial derivatives world and a subprime lending market that swelled to over $600 billion, over one-fifth of all lending in 2006. It all adds up to a corporate-friendly dance party on the backs of retirement fund pensioners and others who can least afford it. The thing that’s most irritating, however, is the sort of shock, befuddlement and indignation at the exceedingly reasonable, base-level questions Ferguson puts to various voices of the status quo in the film. Clearly, their plan is just to dance until the music stops. For more information on the film, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 105 minutes)

“Mike Leigh meets The Sopranos” is the not entirely inaccurate production-notes shorthand for this British kitchen-sink drama, which stars real-life father and son Bob and Robin Hill as Bill and Karl, middle-management-type sectional chieftains of a crime family struggling to keep their business together as, over the course of a hectic week, infighting and hazy rumors of a police informant in their midst threaten to unravel it completely.

Simpleton Karl (above right, a sort of scruffy, neutered, blue-collar
cousin of John Oliver, physically at least) suffers
his father’s serial disrespect and baiting, and doesn’t do much about it. But when he brings home pregnant
girlfriend Valda (Kerry Peacock), it really doesn’t go over well with either of
his already frazzled parents, including mom Maggie (Julia Deakin). As they press him to cut her lose, Karl’s spine stiffens, coinciding with a series of decisions by Bill to “drain the swamp,” as it were, and methodically eliminate long-time henchmen and allies who might be the potential mole.

Co-written and directed by Ben Wheatley, Down Terrace starts off slow,
impaired by impenetrably thick accents and a misguided, unnecessarily
claustrophobic visual scheme. Opening things up a bit — with wider shots to better give a sense of the movie’s drab domestic settings, which serve as ironic counterpoint to its criminal mischief — would have done small wonders for the movie. Still, for fans of certain British TV crime serials, and particularly those schooled in the cinema of Shane Meadows, Down Terrace eventually takes hold as a passable
slice of darkly humorous, stakes-free entertainment — its narrative
pivots, in which ratcheted-up paranoia gets seriocomically spun off in
homicidal directions, employed in purely functional fashion, against a
backdrop of colorful familial bickering. If anything about this domestic
brood rings true, though, seek counseling immediately. For more information on the film, click here. (Magnet, unrated, 89 minutes)