Filmmaker Michael Moore says he's not a cranky liberal

Michael Moore usually makes documentaries with easily dramatized subjects.

But his latest, "Capitalism: A Love Story" (opening Friday) would seem to have less cinematic potential. Wouldn't a film about Wall Street be drowned by statistics and lingo? Who really understands the meaning of "derivatives"?

"I love a challenge," said Moore by phone from New York. "No one is entertained by economics. There's no good way to pitch a story like this, but they [studios and distributors] do like sequels."

Indeed, each new Moore documentary almost can't help looking like a sequel to the last. The Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" dealt with American violence, "Fahrenheit 911" moved to the Iraq War. "Sicko's" concern with the economics of American health care led to reflections on capitalism.

"It's a love story about the rich," he said. "They love all money and they want to get as much as they can."

"Capitalism: A Love Story" also turns out to be one of Moore's more personal films, rooted in his Catholic upbringing and making pointed use of Biblical imagery from Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" (with Robert Powell in the title role) and old Encyclopaedia Britannica films about the fall of the Roman Empire.

"I wanted to use something from a good filmmaker, and I didn't want a cheesy Jesus," said Moore. While he puts words in Powell's mouth (Jesus talks about being unable to help anyone with a pre-existing condition), Moore mostly stays with the original narration.

"It felt true," he said.

In a series of interviews with priests, Moore finds unanimity in their rejection of capitalism. Also chiming in is an old friend, Wallace Shawn, whose monologues sometimes deal caustically with the subject. Other sources are more surprising.

According to Moore, a Republican family sent him a tape of their eviction, while a Wall Street Journal story was the source for an episode about "Dead Peasants" — an insurance scam that makes an employee more valuable dead than alive.

Moore rejects the image of himself as a cranky far-left radical: "That's not me, that's a character created by Fox News."

Some material in the movie comes straight from cable television, which supplies a particularly stirring platform for a heroic but underpaid airline pilot. (It's a subject Moore previously addressed in his 2001 best-seller, "Stupid White Men.")

"I watch way too much C-SPAN," said Moore. "But as a teenager I grew to admire [reporter] I.F. Stone, who said you just have to look — the information is already out there."

Moore worries that anthropologists of the future will be aghast at the "me" culture of the early 21st century: "I think we're gonna look like idiots."

The movie, arriving one year after the government's $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, uses footage of bank robberies to suggest what happened. A series of lengthy anniversary stories, published this month by Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and other magazines, try to give it in-depth treatment.

"There are a lot of unanswered questions," Moore said. "I think it's worth an investigation. It feels like an unsolved case."

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com