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Written by Colin Covert, McClatchy-Tribune
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Thursday, 15 March 2007 |
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MAXED OUT
3 stars
Directed by: James D. Scurlock
Unrated by the MPAA; mature themes.
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If your outrage glands need a workout, be sure to see "Maxed Out," a muckraking, emotionally powerful, wickedly entertaining documentary on the dreary-sounding topic of consumer debt. It will leave you dismayed, enlightened, and ready to shred your MasterCard.
The film is the lively first feature from James D. Scurlock, a Benjamin Franklin Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the oldest business school in America. He made the film to explain how the modern financial industry aggressively goes about its business, and why mounting debt is burdening more and more family budgets to the breaking point.
The story couldn't be more timely, as Wall Street reels from the meltdown of nationwide subprime lenders that provide mortgages to people with poor credit. His film can stand alongside such bright exposes as "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Super Size Me" (it was Morgan Spurlock, not Scurlock, who tackled the junk food industry, by the way).
While Scurlock notes the importance of personal responsibility, financial literacy and living within one's means, his film lays much of the blame for our debt entrapment at the door of predatory lenders - giant financial institutions peddling confusing products that set up their customers to remain eternally in debt. Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, an expert in consumer debt, notes that one of the most desirable demographics for credit card companies is people who have already been through bankruptcy. They can't go bankrupt again, and they have a naive willingness "to make minimum monthly payments forever." Such 21st century indentured servitude, Warren says, "is obscenely profitable."
Scurlock opens his film in Las Vegas with a cheerful real estate agent showing off megamansions that look more like sports bars than private homes. Her clients want dream palaces, they want them now, and they're leveraging the loans with Enron-style creative accounting based on how much they might be able to sell them for before the housing bubble bursts. Few of us have such grandiose aims, though, and most of the film concerns middle-class borrowers who find themselves in over their heads. Those who can least afford to take on more debt - people who a generation ago would have had trouble persuading a bank to give them a line of credit - are deluged with pre-approved cards from financial bottom-feeders.
The film crosses the country to build an impressionistic portrait of a nation in debt. We meet the enthusiastic young owners of People First Recoveries, a Minneapolis debt collection agency. They describe themselves as "pirates" who come close to throwing debtors over the side, then pull them back from drowning to win their cooperation.
Some emotionally battered debtors, however, fall over the edge and drown in red ink. We are introduced to two Oklahoma mothers whose daughters committed suicide because of runaway credit card debt incurred as college undergrads. Their dead children still receive credit card offers.
The inaccuracies of credit scores is brought into focus with the case of Doris Groman of Clear Lake, Minn., whose credit rating was destroyed when a typographical error by a Wells Fargo employee incorrectly declared her deceased. And there are enlightening connections drawn between the banking industry and Washington's power elite. From 2000-2002, credit card issuer Providian paid over $400 million to settle charges that it defrauded customers by holding or "losing" payment checks to bump up customers' interest rates. Then a Providian director was appointed America's corporate ethics czar by President Bush.
Faultfinders may object to the film's scattershot organization, which favors short, lighthearted infoblips easily digestible by Generation ADD. But Scurlock's reporting is apparently sound. As the film's release date neared, I received several phone calls from PR reps for the American Bankers Association who wanted to discuss "Maxed Out" with me.
Fine, I said, e-mail me a list of the film's inaccuracies and we'll have a place to begin. When the note arrived, it contained one quibble about a single statistic and a reminder about all the folks who aren't in trouble with their plastic. I printed it out, brought it home and promptly lost it under a stack of credit card offers. | Only registered users can write comments.
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