You need read only a small portion of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Thomas Piketty’s towering 2013 economic and historical survey of the dynamics of inequality, to know that Piketty, a French academic, is not only a brilliant economist but also one with a gift for making complicated ideas accessible. But the text runs around 750 pages, and not everyone is prepared to plow through Piketty’s methodical analysis of capital-income ratios from 1700 to the near-present.
Enter the documentary version — directed by Justin Pemberton and also called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — for those who prefer their econ illustrated with film and TV clips and a kaleidoscopic montage set to Lorde. Although Piketty is credited with the adaptation (along with Pemberton and Matthew Metcalfe, a producer on the film), the movie is best regarded as a supplement or potential gateway to the book, rather than a distillation. Many other academics — Kate Williams of the University of Reading in England; Suresh Naidu, an economic historian at Columbia University — get prime screen time, with Piketty, who appears as a talking head, often playing a supporting role in his own narrative.
In the book, Piketty used examples from Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to explain how currencies and the investment value of land were understood during those authors’ lifetimes. The film opts for the cinematic correlative, excerpting movies like “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Elysium” to illustrate poverty in the past and a possible future. Piketty notes the risk that the declining share of wealth owned by the middle class could return it to where it stood a century ago, when what qualified as “middle” was almost as poor than the poorest.
Much of the material is ancillary to the book. Williams gives a striking account of the acceleration of Christmas consumerism in the 19th century, when she says people would bankrupt themselves to celebrate the holiday. Once the movie reaches the Roaring Twenties and beyond, the purview becomes more erratic. Granular observations (Piketty explains how during the period of the world wars, bombings, inflation and regulations contributed roughly equally to the destruction of capital, transforming power relationships in society) share screen time with material that plays, more disappointingly, like an introductory overview — of Reagan and Thatcher’s anti-unionism, of the 2008 financial crisis, among other things.
Pemberton, who has a habit of shooting his interviewees unnervingly centered in the wide frame, keeps everything engaging and clear, an accomplishment in a movie that devotes around a minute to explaining the “stagflation” of the 1970s. But the film necessarily lacks the thoroughness and interrogative qualities of Piketty’s written approach. More than the cutaways to Gordon Gekko and the Simpsons, it tends to be the economist’s own observations that satisfy the true wonk itch.
There are other compensations. With fun graphics, Pemberton includes footage from a psychology experiment in which the predetermined winners of a rigged version of Monopoly started to act as if they had won on merit. And if that suggests a dark vision of human nature, Piketty ends the movie on an optimistic note. Creating a more equal society is possible from a technical standpoint, he says. The challenge is intellectual and political.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Not rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
