On DVD: "Inside Job"

With one exceptionally canny soundtrack selection, Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job reveals itself as one of the surest guides yet produced to how our financial system got in its current sorry state. The track in question is Peter Gabriel's "Big Time", and by playing it over the film's scene-setting shots of corporate skyscrapers and white towers, Ferguson immediately establishes how the global meltdown of 2008 came about as a consequence of a certain alpha-male fixation with size.

From a small, manageable, regulated economy, a culture of aggressive capitalism brought us to bigger banks handling more money and rewarding their employees with bigger bonuses - encouraging them to take bigger risks. Blown further out of proportion with the involvement of investment banks and rating agencies, the basic infrastructure was converted into a bigger version of the old numbers racket that held sway over the neighborhood back in the day - only this time, it was on a global scale. Bigger egos and bellies for those who were winning, then - but just as a swelling waistline necessitates looser pants, so too these bankers were soon calling for reduced regulation. Of course, when the bubble eventually burst and we all fell down, it left behind a big mess - and it would be the little people, not the well-insulated bigshots, who were to suffer most for it.

Like the forces Ferguson takes on here, the film is something of a closed shop; it's not one of those activist documentaries that finds it easy to tell us how we might usefully channel our anger. (Although I'd suggest rewatching the end of David Fincher's Fight Club might be a start.) The consolation lies in watching the filmmaker gathering together all the pertinent data in the same place, showing us, in the most methodical fashion, how this heist went down, and then analysing the hell out of these figures for two hours of screen time (or 100 pages of script) in a way rolling news and the print media simply wouldn't have the space for. (Anyone with a fetish for graphs and bar charts will be well away.)

It's all here: the links between politicos and traders, the conflicts of interest that went unacknowledged, the Cassandras who went ignored, the astronomical sums certain individuals walked away with when it all went down, matched only by the monumental arrogance many displayed within the bubble - and (perhaps more surprisingly) in the wake of the collapse. (A standard, recurring defence: "We weren't the only ones with our hands in the till".) This is less of a story than, say, Alex Gibney's Enron doc; like Ferguson's previous No End in Sight (on the Gulf conflict), it's closer in form to a post-mortem, laying the stark facts out before us, and dissecting the financial capillaries to show where the money ran out. Ferguson wields a mean scalpel, both within the editing suite, and in the room with his interviewees. He asks sharp questions, makes pointed interjections - "You can't be serious" to an uptight Dubya aide, "That's not true" to a stammering Federal Reserve chief - appearing unflustered by the prospect anyone might actually walk out on him. (Perhaps as this might illustrate perfectly the short shrift the banking community - and its handsomely paid experts - generally gives to outside intervention.)

The absence of certain key players - their unwillingness to participate - speaks multitudes in itself; those bankers who have agreed to be interviewed appear tanned and sharp-suited - which is to say none of them seem especially haunted or regretful over what they've done, doubtless because they go to sleep each night on mattresses stuffed with the bonuses that continue to creep up, year after year. There is one notable omission - the perspective of those ordinary citizens whose accumulated debt only accelerated the collapse - but perhaps that's because Ferguson knows his intended audience. Nobody's home, certainly, in the film's frequent shots of boarded-up houses and empty office spaces, of building projects that ground to a halt or were abandoned altogether, and it's with this desolate visual poetry that Inside Job seals its case between the stats and talking heads, as Ferguson indirectly, and in a typically calm, judicious manner, puts the finger on those crooks who will go to their doubtless extravagant graves knowing that they robbed the rest of us blind.

Inside Job is available on DVD from Monday.