If you have ever tussled with a credit card company over a suspicious late fee or secret charge, “Maxed Out” will provide some reassurance about the nature of such companies.
They’re all crooked.
At least that’s the depressing impression left by this absorbing documentary, which takes an anecdotal scattershot approach to looking at the massive problem of debt in America.
Director James Scurlock was motivated by a puzzle: Why, with American owing more than $2 trillion in consumer debt and the country at war, government leaders were nevertheless encouraging Americans to keep spending. “When a country is at war, don’t we sacrifice, not spend?” he asked.
The movie gathers individual stories from people who have had an unbelievably rough time with debt: foreclosures, identity confusion (one woman recounts the saga of being declared dead by a credit report) and suicide.
Scurlock also looks at the seamy world of debt collecting, including a couple of nauseating young entrepreneurs who harass debtors with relentless phone calls. Some collectors’ strategies include calling the neighbors and relatives of debtors to shame them into responding.
These vignettes are interesting, although their anecdotal nature limits their effectiveness. Some of the stories, for instance, are clearly examples of addictive personalities, people who simply can’t stop spending money, or who have no idea that buying something with a credit card means you actually do need to pay for it someday.
However, Scurlock does a good job of showing how the credit card companies seduce and exploit such people. And everybody else. As virtually everybody involved acknowledges, reverse logic is dominant here: The credit card companies don’t care about people with good credit. They want people who won’t make their payments.
The Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren calmly outlines a system designed to keep consumers from ever being able to pay off their debts, once they’ve gotten into a cycle of late fees and other penalties.
Meanwhile, our government appoints credit card honchos to be the watchdogs of the system. And when the Senate held hearings on the industry in 2005, they did not ask a single question of the chief executives assembled there. Good to know the senators are on top of the use of steroids in baseball, however.
“Maxed Out” isn’t the last word on the subject. Scurlock is a former businessman and investment newsletter publisher, and he could hone his moviemaking skills more. But it’s a useful broadside against a broken system.
“Maxed Out”
Cha-ching: A useful broadside against the credit card companies, even if director James Scurlock’s scattershot approach tends toward the anecdotal. The reverse logic of the credit-card system – they want people to miss payments and build up debt – is overwhelmingly documented, and the pursuit of this goal is nothing short of predatory.
Rating: Not rated; probably PG for language.
Now showing: Varsity, Seattle.
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