Beyond the Multiplex

"Maxed Out": One nation, under God (and the jackbooted heel of the credit-card companies)
Given that James D. Scurlock's documentary "Maxed Out" is a resolutely uncinematic progression of talking heads -- and they're talking about a subject most of us would rather not even think about -- it's a remarkably entertaining film. Maybe his next film should be about tropical skin diseases, or provide a complete history of dentistry.

Tastes vary, of course, and I'm admittedly using "entertaining" in a dark, paranoid, confirming-your-worst-fears sort of way. The subject in question is credit-card debt, and by interviewing scores of experts and ordinary citizens Scurlock builds a damning incremental case that the old-fashioned banking system, in which credit was extended to those who were actually likely to pay the money back, belongs to the era of cave paintings and WordStar. In case the hair-raising interest rates and oh-so-clever hidden fees on your monthly hadn't clued you in, Scurlock argues that the U.S. economy is now based on ever-increasing and unsustainable levels of debt.

As Harvard economics professor Elizabeth Warren (a former advisor to the banking industry) explains in the film, people coming out of bankruptcy are the perfect credit-card customers. Why? Because they can't file for bankruptcy a second time -- and filing a first time has recently gotten harder -- and because, as one executive told Warren, "They've got a taste for debt. They're willing to make minimum monthly payments. Forever." Sound like anybody you know?

A business-school graduate, Scurlock (who is often confused with Morgan Spurlock, the director of "Super Size Me") takes a straightforward, almost anthropological approach to his subject. He obviously has terrific interviewing skills, because even the oleaginous creeps who buy and sell other people's delinquent debt on the Internet, and the debt collectors who style themselves as modern-day pirates skirting the outermost edges of legality, seem eager to explain their innovations for his camera.

Perhaps accidentally, Scurlock has assembled a grimly hilarious collection of Middle American characters, from Christian financial guru Dave Ramsey to Dave Ballew, a former Indiana banker driven out of the profession by its endless avarice, to Doris Gohman, a Minnesota homemaker who has been unable to convince the major credit reporting agencies that she isn't dead. (I suppose eventually she will be, and then they'll be right.) There are heroes like consumer advocate Bud Hibbs and investigative journalist Mike Hudson, who has exposed the shocking predatory home-loan practices of the nation's largest and most respected banks.

I first saw "Maxed Out" last year at South by Southwest, and I can testify that when people do show up to see it, they respond with laughter, howls of outrage and sometimes with tears. (More than one college student -- a favorite credit-industry target -- has committed suicide under a rising mountain of debt.) Like most film critics, I tend to want imagination, cinematic craft and narrative flow even in documentaries, but there's a lot to be said for the startling clarity and directness of Scurlock's movie. His message is that the hyper-acquisitive lifestyle of our society is built, quite literally, on a house of cards and that all of us -- banks, politicians, the public -- are simply ignoring the coming disaster.

"Maxed Out" opens March 9 in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, Washington, Seattle and Austin, Texas; March 16 in Chicago and Minneapolis; and March 23 in Boston, with other cities to follow.

Fast forward: Revisiting the horrors of 1994 Rwanda -- and the innocence of 1989 Yugoslavia
"Beyond the Gates" is a drama shot in Rwanda by British director Michael Caton-Jones, in the actual locations where some of the worst atrocities in that nation's 1994 internal genocide occurred. As the film proceeds, it builds a sense of mounting horror, and the shameful episode it recounts is certainly worth remembering, no matter how much we might like to forget it.

As violence erupts between the ruling Hutu majority and the persecuted Tutsi minority in the spring of '94, the campus of a Kigali technical college presided over by a veteran English priest (John Hurt) and an idealistic young aid worker (Hugh Dancy) becomes an impromptu refugee camp. (The Hurt and Dancy characters are fictionalized composites, but the story is largely true to life.) Mobs of Hutus -- ordinary citizens who had lived peaceably with Tutsi neighbors for years -- set up unofficial roadblocks all over the country, maiming, raping and killing as they wished. Ultimately as many as 800,000 Tutsi would die, in the largest genocidal campaign since the Holocaust. The Western world essentially did nothing.

At the Kigali college, the West did worse than nothing. As shown in the film, a small detachment of Belgian soldiers, on a United Nations monitoring assignment, protect the refugees for a while, as the murderous gangs outside the gates, wielding clubs and machetes, grow larger and more threatening. When French reinforcements show up, there seems to be hope. But the U.N. troops have only been ordered to extract all foreign nationals (i.e., a handful of white Europeans) and pull out, abandoning the 2,500 Tutsi refugees to their fate. I won't issue an official spoiler, but not much imagination is required.

So I think "Beyond the Gates" (released a year ago in Britain as "Shooting Dogs") is an important film, and it's too bad that it's not a very good one. This subject may not require much subtlety, but Caton-Jones is a Hollywood veteran ("City by the Sea," "The Jackal," "This Boy's Life," "Basic Instinct 2") who can't manage any at all, and the film lurches unsteadily from its early, sunny scenes into a headlong nightmare. Hurt and Dancy's characters seem like archetypes rather than people -- the Christ-like padre and the wounded young questioner, respectively -- and his Hutu and Tutsi characters might as well be armies of demons and angels. This is worth seeing if it comes your way, but both "Hotel Rwanda" and "Shake Hands With the Devil," the remarkable documentary about the Canadian general who failed to prevent the massacres, handle the material more gracefully. (Opens March 9 at the IFC Center in New York; March 16 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington; March 23 in Chicago, Indianapolis and Seattle; and March 30 in Boston, with more cities to follow.)

On the other side of the '90s atrocity ledger we find "Border Post," a history-maker as the first-ever cinematic collaboration between all the former Yugoslav republics (if you're keeping score, those are, or were, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro and Slovenia -- with the split between Serbia and Montenegro coming after the film was made). Rajko Grlic's film is a sometimes wistful, sometimes farcical comedy, in the honorable Eastern European tradition, set along the Yugoslav-Albanian border in the halcyon days of 1987.

We've got an incompetent lieutenant who doesn't want his wife to learn about his STD and concocts a dangerous international incident, while his men -- recruits drawn from the various nationalities of Comrade Tito's makeshift country -- desperately want to get out of uniform and go home. "Border Post" is an exceedingly well-crafted military satire, but of course it's mostly memorable for its delicate foreshadowing of the tremendous tragedy that awaited all these men, and would destroy their country, in the following decade. (Now playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York. Other engagements may follow.)

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