Mark Reviews Movies: CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 30, 2020

Admit it: You see the title Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and you have certain expectations. It sounds dull, right? The film is a documentary, too, so you're probably imagining a bunch of talking heads, droning dryly about economics and political theory and banks and assets and inflation and on and on.

It would be a lie to contradict any of that description, except for a few key points: The film, despite its content, isn't dull, and its talking heads, despite discussing all of those topics and more, aren't dry. Director Justin Pemberton has made a rather nimble film, which covers centuries of history and economic trends and political shifts without ever falling into the realm of a lecture. It's engaging throughout, because the filmmaker is smart in his interview choices, skilled in his ability to craft a narrative out of history and ideas, and clever in the way he puts it all together with related pieces of media and archival footage.

The main concept of the narrative comes from Thomas Piketty, a French economist who wrote the 2013 book with which the film shares its title. The book was a best-seller, selling over a million copies across the world in its first two years of release.

That might not seem like a big deal, but consider the facts that it's non-fiction and that it deals with economic history and formulas. A lot of people often dismiss the things that become popular within a certain context (Think of how quickly people dismiss the comparative success of independent films because they don't make as much money as one of the year's superhero movies), but they do that at their own peril. There's clearly something to Piketty's book, or it wouldn't have those sales numbers, wouldn't have been translated from the original French to other languages, and wouldn't serve as the exclusive foundation for a documentary seven years after the book's original publication.

We get the appeal of Piketty's book almost immediately in the film. Pemberton begins with the author, obviously, who puts forth the central thesis. The history of economics is based on capital, and the history of capital is based on those who have it and those who don't. Capital, by the way, is any money or asset owned by a person or an organization. For as many concepts and as much niche terminology as the film's interview subjects discuss, this word is the only one for which Pemberton provides an on-screen definition. The impressive thing, though, is that the film and its professional talkers never lose us in the miasma of the subject matter.

Pemberton has assembled an all-star team—relatively speaking, of course—of experts, whose credentials are impressive, obviously, but whose manner of speaking is even more vital for the film's success. Piketty, who begins and ends the film while providing the major narrative markers in between, is amiable and down-to-earth, even as he digs into concepts that most people only think about in the broadest of terms. The economy, for most, is made up of businesses, the stock market, employment numbers, and whether or not people are buying things—and on what, specifically, they're spending their money.

Piketty sees that, naturally, but he's looking at the bigger picture. From the age of the European aristocracy in the 16th century until now, it's about in whose hands the majority of the world's capital rests. The element of any economy that defines how healthy it is, in Piketty's view, how much inequality there is in the distribution of capital amongst the population.

In aristocratic times, the upper classes possessed the overwhelming majority of it and owned most of the land. That persisted and morphed with the rise of industry, and Piketty notes how the pre-war politics of nationalism and systematic prejudice arose from economic insecurity. It's fascinating to watch such patterns emerge—how the inequality of capital always trends toward the same percentages, for example. Neither Pemberton nor any of the interview subjects make a fine point of those repetitions. The filmmaker trusts his storytelling and his talking heads to teach us enough to let us see them on our own.

The film becomes a whirlwind tour of history—beginning with those aristocratic systems, taking us through the Industrial Revolution, bringing us through two world wars, noting moments of economic depression, recession, and "stagflation," as that weird period in the 1970s was called. Pemberton uses footage from a range of films to drive home certain points about certain eras, and as technology advances in that timeline, he incorporates montages of actual archival footage of the era to serve as the backdrop for the narration and interviews. The film is always moving, which gives the history lesson an intrinsic sense of momentum.

The main reason this film is so involving, though, is that its narrative comes from the interviewees, who include multiple university professors, a few journalists, and other leaders in the field of economics. When they talk, we're getting the actual meat of this story, instead of observational details about it. We're getting a narrative of ideas and facts and theories, not a history lesson with a smattering of analysis.

To be honest, it's kind of thrilling to watch a filmmaker who's so confident in his subject matter, his interview subjects, and his ability to communicate such complex substance with such clarity. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is proof that skillful filmmaking can make even the most superficially boring topics engrossing.

Note: Capital in the Twenty-First Century is available on distributor Kino Lorber's virtual theatrical program Kino Marquee. You can rent the film for home viewing, with part of the cost going to your local independent theaters (e.g., the Music Box Theatre in Chicago). For more information and to purchase access to the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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