The Corporation

An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.

The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial chemicals are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company leased its systems to the Nazis--and serviced them on a monthly basis--so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly process.

The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding tracking shot in an infinite patents archive, there's scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world--welcome to it. --Richard T. Jameson

It's not easy to make an entertaining documentary -- running nearly two and a half hours, no less -- about a subject that most audiences find too depressing, challenging, and complex to foster engagement. Remarkably, The Corporation does just that, its achievement all the more laudable for taking on a topic whose very nature is amorphous and hard to identify. As the title indicates, that topic is the corporation itself -- that faceless but omnipresent body that, in the guise of countless business and manufacturing organizations, exerts massive influence over modern industrial life. The left-leaning politics of the filmmakers are apparent, but never in a dogmatic way, as they break up the movie into numerous sections diagnosing and offering prognoses for the corporation, as if that entity was a psychiatric patient. To no surprise, the corporation comes off roughly equivalent to the most disturbed mentally ill individuals, acting without guilt, shame, or consideration of consequences that include environmental devastation, disregard for personal and legal rights, and wanton exploitation of third-world peoples and resources (and much more, but a complete list would necessitate several capsule reviews). Sound dry? It isn't, because the filmmakers cannily employ witty graphics, stock footage, and above all, fascinating interviews to illustrate the history of the growth of the destructive power of corporations, fast-paced and well edited. The interviewees include some of the usual suspects you'd expect to show up in such a film -- Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Howard Zinn, for instance -- but many more less celebrated figures comment, sometimes guardedly and sometimes surprisingly frankly, on the monstrous but relatively anonymous behavior corporations generate. Some of them, one suspects, end up giving away more than they really want to. What's even more chilling than the environmental damage and human exploitation that corporations wreak is the guileless, almost gleefully willful co-option of some of the interviewees into the corporate process, like the university students whose studies are actually "sponsored" and paid for by corporations; the Shell executive who claims that he shares the same goals as protesters against his company's environmental policies; or the guy who makes a living being a deceitful corporate infiltrator-spy of sorts. In this way, it's suggested that part of the corporate malady is the human character itself. It's a depressing, if informative and thought-provoking, prognosis, though ameliorated slightly by a more hopeful closing section documenting some pockets of resistance to the corporate danger, most movingly through a carpet manufacturer who actually seems sincerely dedicated to making his business more ecologically responsible. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Movie Guide