Piketty would be proud
Capital in the 21st Century (PG, 103 mins) Directed by Justin Pemberton Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
If you had asked me a couple of years ago, walking blearily out of the lengthy and mostly toothless documentary about the ascension of St Richie McCaw of Kurow, what director Justin Pemberton’s next project might be, I’m pretty sure ‘‘an entertaining and pithy introduction to the theories of the rock-star French economist Thomas Piketty’’ would not have been the answer that flew unbidden to my lips.
And yet, here we are, with Pemberton’s Capital in the 21st Century about to make a victory lap of our smaller cinemas, after selling out some of the bigger ones at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. And good luck to it.
Pemberton’s introduction to Piketty – and his unlikely 700-page bestseller of the same name – is a thing well made. Piketty’s thesis; that inequality will only worsen if we don’t directly address it with greater taxation of wealth (remind me again why that is even debated?) is presented against a backdrop of talking heads – very well chosen and eloquent, the lot of them – and some unexpectedly whizzy graphics and montages of archival stills and footage.
Historian Kate Williams, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, economist Francis Fukuyama and Piketty himself are all especially well deployed.
Pemberton’s worst idea is to use old movies to illustrate Piketty’s historical context. Scenes from The Grapes of Wrath et al have a job to do and an argument to sustain. But by using clips from fictional movies, Pemberton lays himself too open to criticism that the thesis of the film is similarly fictionalised. That aside, Capital in the 21st Century does Piketty proud. It summarises the book without dumbing the content, but remains watchable and entertaining. The almost total absence of graphs and diagrams was appreciated.