Costa-Gavras’ Capital is an amazing film, really amazing. I saw it in theaters twice in the span of a week – I can’t remember the last time a movie struck me enough to warrant a second theater viewing. I often on this blog hold up Costa-Gavras as representing the historical ideal in the genera of sociopolitical thrillers, and it’s easy to forget he’s the one “old master” that we’re lucky enough to still have around (Pakula, Pollack, Zinnemann, Kubrick, Lumet, Rohmer – all gone now.) As Capital clearly shows, that old Costa-Gavras magic is still there. I highly encourage everyone to see this marvelous film.

Capital is an incredible psychosocial statement about the financialization of the world’s economy. It’s an artistic representation of the mental perversion which underlies the actions of the ultra rich and their elite corporate gendarmes as they pursue their chimerical but deadly goal of owning everything on earth. The lead character of CEO Marc Tourneuil (played by Gad Elmaleh) is part of these gendarmes, the highly-compensated functional layer beneath the ultra rich, essential to keeping the whole ridiculous and destructive shell game going. He’s appointed CEO of the French bank he works for, immediately finding himself under enormous pressure from all directions, and starts maneuvering to play these pressures off each other for his own material benefit: the creation of enormous off-shore accounts that he can fuck off to once his masters flush him down the toilet.

Tourneuil is a marvelous character, wonderfully multi-dimensional – an intellectual, a reformer, a pragmatist, a fantasist. Confident and paranoid at the same time, loyal and selfish at the same time, he is self-aware and conflicted on a variety of emotional planes. He’s no caricature, he’s very human, but it is the nature of our capitalist system that such humanness must dissolve and be swept away in an inexorable current of greed vouchsafed by limitless power. Marc Tourneuil undergoes not so much a transformation as a kind of warped “realization,” a debased maturation, if you will, rooted in the very academic intellectuality that gives him pause about his actions. The trajectory and complexity of his developmental arc leaves you stunned and amazed.

Despite the somewhat heavy theme of Capital, it is neither wonky nor polemical. Indeed, it’s positively gripping. The dialog is fantastic, with a deliciously subversive humor to it. The pacing is superb, and the film is replete with great characters, subplots and indelible scenes. To call out just a few of my favorites: There’s the incredible character of the supermodel Tourneuil becomes obsessed with, who with her aimless seductiveness and causal insanity is a perfect allegory for the transfixing nature of financial acquisitiveness. There’s the subplot with the retired policeman hired by Tourneuil to set up his off-shore accounts and dig up dirt on everyone he interacts with. There’s the wonderful holiday scene with his extended family – all penniless sheep asking him with subdued envy how he spends $150,000 a month – where his uncle throws the horrifying societal effect of Tourneuil’s actions in his face with dazzling brevity and effectiveness, only to be parried in equally stunning fashion.

And then there’s the final scene, which ascends to heights of social commentary that no modern filmmaker could pull off – I’m still a bit in awe that Costa-Gavras had the guts to end the film the way he did, and that he actually managed to do it in a way that did not seem manipulative or a cop-out; indeed, in retrospect it strikes me as the only reasonable ending to the film. The man is truly a master filmmaker!

I must be watching too many lame-ass American movies these days, because I had forgotten how Costa-Gavras films are like being dropped onto a moving treadmill, intellectually. In the film’s opening minutes, I remember thinking “Good heavens, I’m actually going to have to turn my brain on to watch this!” The flow of information is furious, and large numbers of characters are introduced and sketched with brutal, old-school efficiency. But it is such a joy to watch a film like this, one that does not pander to our laziness or our cynicism. It challenges us, it entertains us, it educates us, and it roils us emotionally, without seeming overly invested in any of those outcomes. It’s Golden Age film making in the grandest of traditions.

Do not miss this outstanding film! It’s still playing at the Union Square 14, if you are in New York City.