Waging war on business

If this is the year of the documentary, some may feel that The Corporation is the documentary of the year. A less frenetic polemic than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the weight of its argument makes Super Size Me seem almost trivial.

You don't have to believe it all to be impressed. But if you don't believe any of this hostile, seldom hysterical dissection of the huge corporations that rule us as thoroughly as governments, you would have to be more than slightly naïve.

The film, by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, traces the birth of the corporation from the mid-19th century to the modern "bad apples" of Enron and Haliburton. It shows how the corporation emerged in law as a "legal person", imbued with a personality of pure self-interest, and how the rationale of "externalities" (which means the exploitative consequences on the rest of us of a transaction between corporations) cannot be deemed, according to Milton Friedman, to be legally anyone's fault.

If this doesn't make us feel paranoid, consider the fact that, under standard diagnostic tools, the "personality" of giant corporations is inherently as amoral and lacking in guilt as the psychopath's, even though it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.

Four frightening case studies support this attack on laissez-faire capitalism: for example, the unsuccessful attempt to privatise Bolivia's rainwater and Nike's use of child labour in the Far East. To balance the argument, the saintly visage of Roy Anderson, the CEO of carpet manufacturer Interface, tells us: "If we can't make carpets in a sustainable way, then maybe we don't have a place on this earth."

There are others who admit culpability, such as the telephone company head who likens his corporation's work in an advertisement to a soaring eagle rather than to a vulture, and then leaps away from the cameras to say: "Okay, guys, enough bullshit."

The most disturbing moment is when a commodity trader tells us that his first thought on the day of the Twin Towers disaster was: "How much is gold up?"

Is this long, carefully argued film as manipulative as the corporations it savages with such steely venom? Sometimes it is. Generally, however, it is a rousing call to arms that is more measured than you might expect. You come out of the film feeling that something must be done - though even after 144 minutes with Noam Chomsky and his kind, you are not quite sure what.

The Corporation
Cert: PG