Maxed Out

This evening I went to free screening of the new documentary Maxed Out. (I love being a student. The director James Scurlock came to answer questions, as did Professor Warren, who was interviewed in the film.) It’s a movie about a fascinating and timely topic: consumer debt in America. The median American household currently spends 107% of their yearly income. Which pretty much everyone would agree isn’t sustainable. So what is it about our culture, our society – our credit card and mortgage market? – that gets us in this predicament? And what can we do about it? This film only partially addresses each idea, but it’s a big problem with a lot of players, so one can’t really expect more from a single 87-minute documentary.

Maxed Out is a documentary of the Fast Food Nation and Fahrenheit 9/11 family: relatively entertaining, a bit over-simplistic (I wish there had been a bit more data, and dates), and really best at snide comments. I kind of wish that a documentary maker would remember that he has the audience for about an hour and half – he doesn’t have to make his jokes by media footage intercut with silent text poking fun at politicians’ soundbites. It just seems like a cheap shot to make fun of politicians, especially when you don’t have to and the topic is big enough not to be partisan anyway. Also, when intercut text is the documentary maker’s version of a comedian’s one-liner, its passivity and lack of voice makes it feel like it has less integrity to me.

But this is a quarrel with the style of documentary that has become popular, and there’s probably nothing I can do about that. Within the framework of this style, the documentary is satisfactorily put together. There’s a bunch of footage, some of it really funny, some of it heartbreaking, some of it maddening. There are some great juxtapositions of a 1960 instructional video about credit and current credit card advertisements, and some pretty great stock footage that is used to make points by putting the analogies interviewees make on the screen, including one a zealous and enthusiastic collector makes comparing himself to a pirate whose job is to “push someone out on the plank as far as they can go, so then they will do anything to come back.” He said it to explain why he likes his job, but the image was just so appalling that when an old silent film scene of a pirate sword fight flashed on the screen, it was both sad and hilarious.

Perhaps it’s not saying much to say that the film was actually compelling even with its stylistic faults. I mean, how can it not be compelling? This documentary really makes you realize that debt in this country isn’t happening just at the margins of our society. Nor is debt exclusively the result of “spend money to make money” “Flip that House” TLC-show spending. It’s happening to middle class families and their kids in college. It’s happening to servicemen who were deployed for much longer than their savings and mortgages could stand. It’s happening to the poor, too, and the disenfranchised, and the mentally disabled, and the elderly, and the sick. If you aren’t aware of the scope of the issue, this movie is really worth it. But even if you do know, from academic reading or an anecdote, it’s heartbreaking to hear some of these stories from real people. A few of the stories are truly tragedies, and to see the ripple effect of bankruptcy and bad credit, sometimes to the point of death, is just... let’s just say that I was actually crying at one point.

At times, Maxed Out strays from its didactic message (“Consumer Financial Products Companies Are Exploiting America, and We’re Letting Them”), which makes the film a bit scattered. Originally, it was supposed to be a movie about consumer culture in America, and you can tell he just didn’t have the heart to lose his favorite footage. There’s a prologue and epilogue section that are far too long and don’t really mesh with the rest of the film’s story about debt, except debt’s tenuous connection to our ideas about the rich and famous (Robin Leach is even interviewed). Mr. Scurlock also included a few random scenes that seem to try to paint other entities with the same brush as the banks who charge astronomical interest rates and fees, such as a single throwaway scene of a preacher talking about tithing. I think he was trying to say that megachurches talking about tithing are like bank collectors who demand payments from people who can’t afford them. But to give the director the benefit of the doubt, there’s no explanation why that scene is in there, no connection to the rest of the film. It’s just there, like a remnant of the original “consumer culture” film idea that was just never cut. But if Mr. Scurlock is trying to imply with that scene what I think he’s implying, he’s just wrong. Which is sad, because so much of the rest of his film is solid and compelling, and now I have to go to sleep at night wondering, “Why, oh why, do we allow and even support what amounts to nothing less than predatory (and sometimes deceitful) usury?” Maxed Out can't answer that question, but it’ll certainly make you want to ask the question until someone does reply.