I have a confession to make. I am a super nerd. What, you hadn't guessed that from all the gushing reviews of superhero movies and the fact that I take time off work each year and spend my holidays watching multiple movies per day rather than sunning myself on a beach? Well if you hadn't already worked it out, I'm confessing it now after having it confirmed last night when I enjoyed "The Spirit of '45" so much. A documentary based on how England rebuilt the country and economy after World War 2, and what happened since. This film will have another showing this week so if you like the sound of it, look it up and get along.
The drawcard for those not into economics and politics could be the fact that this is directed by the British director Ken Loach, who may not be well known here but is renowned in film circles for his 'social realism' style of movie making. Which is appropriate, because the doco is concerned with the social impacts of real events around the end of the war and it is clear that the filmmaker is a socialist.
The message is all important in this documentary, which has kind of copied the Michael Moore approach where you take your view of an issue and then just put stuff on the screen which backs that up and don't worry about interviewing anyone with a different opinion at all. Now I can say that and still say I liked the movie ok? The message here is "socialism works, unfettered capitalism doesn't" which is why I, a nerd with an Economics degree, found it really interesting.
The theory put forward by all involved is that England would never have recovered from the great depression and overcome the malaise that could have occurred after World War 2 was won, had the people not elected the Labour Government which had a strong socialist policy and passed many laws to nationalise many industries and sectors for the greater good. The employment, healthcare and housing this provided definitely looked to have been beneficial and the film spends a long time focusing on the "5 pillars" that were the key to England's revitalisation, and how the elderly folk they interviewed felt about it. A short amount of time is spent at the end looking at how the structures created then began to be dismantled in the Thatcher era and continue to have been since, and links the decline of socialist policy with a decline in British society in general - rising unemployment, drug and crime problems, poor health etc. Whether this is due to the privatisation of key industries and sectors in England or just a general symptom of the current global economy structure
Loach has constructed this documentary in a fairly basic style, which combines archival footage of people living and working in England from the 1930s to today with footage of political leaders of the time, intercut with current interviews from various folk reminiscing about the times. The 'talking heads' are half ordinary people who lived through the time (or their parents/grandparents did) and half experts on the particular topic at hand, but nobody famous. This ensures you are not distracted from the message. The ordinary folk included have been well chosen, as it's just like hearing your grandpa talk about the olden days, and their memories and the smiles or tears they bring to their eyes give the documentary some heart and some humour. Without them it would have been exceedingly dry. With them, it's fascinating stuff for those with fairly liberal views of economics.
The only downsides to this movie were the inclusion of subtitles (everyone was speaking English and not hard to understand!) and to my mind, a lack of statistics and numbers. I understand the focus was not on that, but I was fascinated by how the British Government had the money to undertake all the spending that is shown in the film, and where that came from. This is not explored. So, a little unbalanced and it definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea (get it?) but fascinating stuff and it may be quite instructional given the governments that most of the world are living under at the present time.
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