‘Broke: The New American Dream’ Review
by Ben ShapiroI received Michael Covel’s new documentary, Broke: The New American Dream [trailer - website] in the mail about a week ago, and watched it in one sitting. The film describes itself as “a vivid, honest, often humorous and always insightful look at our struggle with investments and retirement.” The film is vivid and often humorous – it is peppered with slivers of good advice from 1950s financial films and cartoons – and, in the mold of documentarians like Michael Moore, it focuses mainly on people and less on specifics. That said, Broke isn’t a complete breakdown of what happened and how we got here, or how we’ll get out of it.
Broke is an ambitious movie, covering ground from the subprime meltdown to the relationship between the stock market and the “irrational exuberance” targeted by Professor Robert Schiller. For all its ambition, the film does come off as a bit scattered, mixing personal stories with broader (and often vaguer) points about the nature of the financial markets. If you’re looking for a detailed analysis of real estate finance or an explanation of the mismanagement by the federal government and Wall Street, you’re not likely to find it here – this is more of a media critique, and a critique of the American mindset that we should “get rich quick” through the market rather than doing our research. (more…)
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