With the coronavirus pandemic lunging hickory wood into the bonfire of contradictions that is modern capitalism, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a timely, easy-to-digest documentary that provides a 101 historical overview on how we got to where we are today. Adapted from the best-selling 2013 book by French economist Thomas Piketty, the film is a fitting prognosis for (almost) all of our society’s most rapacious ills, which has spawned levels of world inequality not seen since the Victorian era.

The stirring but by no means controversial argument is this: free market capitalism does not produce the levels of social progress, equality, and freedom that has been traditionally believed; that measures like wealth and income are not the same; and that oligarchy and authoritarianism are what lie ahead (if they haven’t arrived already) if capital is not regulated and distributed more equitably.  Those who remain entrenched in their faith in capitalist (or libertarian) ideology will most likely be unconvinced in the way Christian fundamentalists are to a Christopher Hitchens polemic. But for most open-minded audiences, the film will provide ample discursive material even when it veers off course.

Filmmaker Justin Pemberton begins with ominous archival footage taken during the fall of the Berlin Wall: the final death swing to Soviet-style Communism and the ultimate vindication for unregulated free markets and global capitalism. “The problem,” Piketty narrates, “is that it went too far.” We are followed by Lorde’s “Royal” cynically playing over sweeping aerial shots of Manhattan skyscrapers, sprawling Hampton estates, golf courses, and stock market tickers.

Like Thomas Ferguson’s Inside Job, about the 2008 financial crisis and the culprits behind it, Pemberton visualizes Capital with chaotic foreboding, though with not as much indignation. Stylistically, the film uses a breathless amount of archival footage, interspersed with ominous shots of luxury New York City condos overlooking the dilapidated urban underclass, and relevant film/television clips that help drive a specific point home.

Besides Piketty, it’s also narrated by a handful of disparate, and at times questionable, experts. For instance, Joseph Stiglitz, a strong economist in his own right who has written extensively about these issues for decades, surely deserves more interview time than, say, Francis Fukuyama, a former neoconservative who has frequently been so spectacularly wrong (he’s the same guy who believed in the early 1990s that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the “end of history”). 

Hence, the film’s greatest weakness is that its entire argument depends on one (heavily debated) book. The only views expressed are aligned with Piketty’s entire thesis. Surely, both those new and familiar to the subject would benefit from a film offering more diverse academic views: think anthropologists like David Harvey or black feminists like Angela Davis. Also, where the hell is Marx in all this? One of the pioneers of modern sociology might have something to say.

The film also glosses over the deeply entrenched racial character of capital accumulation in its coverage of American history, overemphasizing the 1950s as a time of “American prosperity” and omitting the crucial fact that it was mainly white Americans who experienced these gains. Even the civil rights movement is implicitly made to look like an outgrowth of the suburban middle class—left out is a 1960s poll indicating that most white Americans opposed the March on Washington and overwhelmingly opposed living next to a black neighbor. These are not minor details. As with colonialism and imperialism, which the film retells as if its residues don’t linger in the present, they are crucial to the story.

Capital is based on a deeply insightful albeit flawed economic book, and it fortunately makes its most important points reasonably clear. But like Piketty, the film lacks a clear prescriptive take, dedicating very little of its running time on remedies or tactics to realistically tackle global inequality. There are brief reformist proposals like progressive taxation, but these are given passing mentions. Some of this is quite understandable. After all, this isn’t a miniseries, though it should be.

Ultimately, the breadth of modern history the documentary covers will prove educational to those new to the subject matter. Whether it will get viewers to seriously think about the world we want, instead of the world that is, is another matter.