The Corporation

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

It's cheering to see thought-provoking festival documentaries given wider release and we should encourage the enterprising exhibitors with our custom. But this, the latest in a run of anti-establishment polemics is, in sum, rather less than it appears. Drawing so heavily on Canadian law professor Joel Bakan's The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power that it's effectively the film of the book, it starts with an 1886 US Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the same legal rights as individuals. Before that, we learn, corporations had been mostly legal entities created for single, mainly public-works projects and the film seems to suggest that the court opened a Pandora's box of abuses - though it doesn't explore or even explain why the decision was more catastrophic than, say, the creation of limited liability.

Instead, the idea serves mainly as a platform for a somewhat tricksy examination of corporations as though they were humans: they're greedy, manipulative, deceitful and they cannot form stable relationships. Says a psychiatrist who has helped the FBI to profile serial killers: the corporation has "all the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath".

The problem with this is that it doesn't get us very far. The film-makers are fascinated with the psychopath device but they seem to forget that it's corporate inhumanity (which prizes organisational objectives above individual conscience) rather than some notionally humanoid nature that is the problem. No individual in Nike or Monsanto would do what Nike or Monsanto do: that's why they need Nike and Monsanto to do it.

This ingratiating and somewhat irritating device hampers the first hour of the film and the robotically monotonous voiceover (possibly intended as a self-referential joke) mars the whole thing. Constructed with graphs and charts and tables it feels at times like a university lecture or a PowerPoint presentation, too, but it's full of fascinating vignettes. We see how psychologists train toy companies to manipulate kids to nag shopping parents; we get an excellent summation of Fox News' futile attempt to kill its own journalists' report about Monsanto's use of dangerous bovine growth hormones to stimulate milk production - and then try to silence the journos; Noam Chomsky and that Moore guy are interesting talking heads.

A socialist analysis might find that the film avoids looking at the capitalist soil in which the corporation thrives which is a bit like blaming cholera on a bacterium rather than on dirty water. But even if it collates more than it reveals, it is an exhaustive and often absorbing compendium of corporate wrongdoing and entertaining cinema for the brain.

DIRECTORS: Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott

RUNNING TIME: 145 mins

RATING: M (low level offensive language)

SCREENING: Village, Queen St from Thursday