Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" is an ambitious mess of a movie: Part filmmaker autobiography, part historical lesson, part exploitative emotional narrative. All of this focused around the American economic system. It is perhaps the most sweeping topic Moore has ever covered. In turn, "Capitalism" is also one of his ill-focused works; a film that does not find its emotional or intellectual thrust until the last third of its two hours and twenty minutes of run time.

A lot of this has to do with "Capitalism's" evolution. At first, Moore was working on a sequel to "Fahrenheit 9/11" with a focus on George W. Bush's second term. Ya know, privatizing Social Security, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the failure of de-regulations and tax cuts to stimulate the economy. You know, all the hits.  Then, that became a more generalized look at this country's economic condition in the past fifty years and how our country went from being able to have a middle class that required only one job per household to a country where the middle class has been reduced to a chaotic version of the working poor. Moore started piecing this together by looking at federal policy's goal of sending American jobs overseas while the position of the American worker was allowed to falter. Then, the mortgage and banking crisis hit so Moore wanted to look at how the financial industry's infusion of policymakers and political contributions led to a rushed piece of legislation that helped very few.

Yet, despite all of these changes, each of these component's still fall chaotically into "Capitalism." It should be noted "Fahrenheit 9/11" had a similar transition from being simply about the Bush administration's response to the horrible tragedy of that day to an anti-war polemic in light of the United State's invasion of Iraq. That film also lacked a cohesive message and a proper narrative structure. Because, no matter what you think of Moore or his politics, he is a masterful storyteller. That's right: Moore is not a documentarian or a journalist as his detractors try and proclaim him solely for the purpose of bemoaning the fact that he doesn't display those standards. He's a filmmaker. Moore has a point of view and is exclusively concerned in getting your attention to that point. He does not want to be "fair and balanced" or objective. He wants his side to look good and the other side to look bad.

But one thing a masterful storyteller even needs is a steadfast purpose: You need to know where the story is going to end once you start telling it. Between talking about being an altar boy and about his dad's quality GM job and the presentation statistics of Reagan-onimcs and about the tragic stories of real people suffering from current financial policies and a conspiracy theory on Goldman Sach's influence on the executive branch, it's hard to figure out where Moore is going with all of this. That all of this shows a downward spiral of America's capitalistic system? Sure...I suppose it does do all of that.Does he want to make a history lesson or a film perceived as "contemporaneous" that won't hold up as well a few years from now?  There's a lot of problems Moore faces with his story by jumbling all of this up. Instead of jumping on the financial recovery and trying to dig deeper into that, perhaps he could have woven all of this into the story he had already started.

Moore's style is same as it was when he profiled the rise and fall of his hometown of Flint, MI twenty years ago with "Roger and Me". But now his approach is a bit different. His films resemble essays and tackle big themes. While ambitious, his slavery to current events thrown him off his message.  I mention none of those things to pluck at Moore's ideology or message but just to fault him on the very structure of "Capitalism". Once he gets into the last segment of his film and connects some of his historical points with contemporaneous events, Moore really does offer a cohesive argument and an inevitably compelling. Tying FDR's call for a "Second Bill of Rights" into the split between the United States and the rest of the developed world with the story a company in Chicago shut down when Bank of American, which taxpayers had just bailed out, demanded they honor their last paychecks reminds you of how good Moore can be when has a clear point. It also disappoints as far as how well the rest of the film could have been.

Three stars (out of five)

"Capitalism: A Love Story" is Rated R for some language.