Michael Moore has blasted the greed and shortsightedness of the automobile industry (Roger & Me), America’s infatuation with guns (Bowling for Columbine) and the Bush administration’s run-up to war in Iraq (Fahrenheit 9/11). Now Moore has aimed his arrows at our economic system in the witty, jaunty and often hilarious Capitalism: A Love Story.

It’s not so much a love story as a dissection of the cruelties of a system that has brought the nation to the brink of economic collapse and the widespread hardships of the little people who have lost their homes and their jobs in an economic downturn that few of them understand and none of them had a hand in. Of course, it’s aimed at the greed of the rich and powerful Wall Street bankers whose economic juggling has led to near catastrophe, and Moore sets it up as a battle of wills between the poor and the wealthy.

At first it seems as though he is playing the role of the bleeding-heart documentary filmmaker, selectively choosing the most unfortunate people to make his case. But the longer Capitalism goes on, with news footage and interviews with economists and congressional leaders, the more Moore seems on solid footing.

It’s more than just a harangue against a system that Moore feels has subverted democracy and used its influence to take over the reins of power in Washington. Capitalism: A Love Story is hard to resist because of its breezy sense of humor.

Capitalism begins, amusingly enough, with an old Encyclopedia Britannica film, Life in Ancient Rome, the kind of movie shown in middle school history classes, but into which Moore has inserted contemporary shots of everything from sweatshop workers to NASCAR crashes to former Vice President Dick Cheney in order to draw parallels between the things that brought down the Roman Empire and the things Moore feels are undermining America today.

It’s a strong start, but following this funny sequence Moore loses his footing and his focus, taking us through a series of home evictions which, while poignant and in one case extremely dramatic, tell the same story from not very different angles and without any clear-cut outcomes.

Moore seems to be drifting. But soon he regains his balance, forward drive and entertaining flash in a series of rapid-fire vignettes that encompass everything from the shift of the balance of power from the voters to the tycoons, company lockouts and the Wall Street bailout. He paints the bailouts as having been engineered by the same people who caused the economic calamity in the first place with exotic credit systems even many of them didn’t understand. It’s done with a clever, sometimes offbeat touch and a show-and-tell style, such as when he takes his father down to the rubble-strewn empty lot that once was the site of the AC Sparkplug company where his father had worked for 33 1/2 years.

In a sense, Moore blames the American people for what happened in allowing Wall Street, as he charges, to take control of the government. Moore points to a speech by President Jimmy Carter warning against unbridled consumerism as the moment America turned away from a message it did not want to hear and instead voted in Ronald Reagan, whom Moore describes as a union buster in the pocket of corporate interests. He points to Reagan’s slashing of corporate taxes and the handing of the reins of economic power to Wall Street insiders. Moore backs up his claims by quoting himself, using clips from his own Roger & Me to show how corporate profits at General Motors rose even as workers were laid off by the tens of thousands.

He jumps around the country to make his point about the dangers of runaway corporate greed –– a pair of Pennsylvania judges who sentenced young people convicted of relatively minor infractions to long stretches in a privately owned detention center from which the judges allegedly received kickbacks; wondering whether airline safety has been compromised by cutbacks in pilot pay, especially those working for regional airlines who must take second jobs or food stamps to make ends meet; corporations that take out life insurance policies on employees, naming themselves as beneficiaries, unbeknown to the employees or their families.

He interviews a couple of Roman Catholic priests and a bishop who decry the inequities of capitalism. He covers a worker sit-down strike at a Chicago manufacturer that has closed its doors in bankruptcy without paying wages owed and the rally by supporters around the country that sent shock waves to the big banks that had ordered the place shut down.

He saves his toughest ammunition for the Wall Street bailout, which Moore sees as having been rammed through Congress by a group of government bureaucrats who were former Wall Street insiders. Here, with memories of that multibillion-dollar bailout that was so unpopular with the public still fresh, Capitalism: A Love Story takes on elements of a nightmare while taking aim at such bigwigs as former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd and former President George W. Bush. Bush’s panicky message about economic collapse to the American people and the need for speed in staving off catastrophe has been “dressed up” with hilarious cartoonish imagery. Moore skewers these fear mongers, then roasts them and their message that scared Congress into finally approving the bailout.

Although Moore does eventually offer a glimmer of hope, much of Capitalism: A Love Story is scary stuff. Yet it’s told in a way that we might be able to laugh at ourselves and at those in power.

****Capitalism: A Love Story

Rated: R, contains profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com