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What, no Enron? Last week’s image of Ken Lay being taken away in handcuffs on the news overshadows Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott’s stolid, 145-minute The Corporation, which offers only a glimpse of the biggest corporate scandal in history. Likewise, Martha Stewart barely makes a cameo. But there’s plenty more dirt to be had in this exhaustive indictment of the 150-year-old institution that, if this film is to be believed, is more or less the Antichrist. Composed mostly of talking heads (Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are among the usual and unusual suspects), coy snippets of ’50s public-service shorts, and baldly literal illustrations of metaphors (corporations are compared with Frankenstein’s monster; cut to the same from the campy La figlia di Frankenstein), the first half enumerates the sins of the title entity. It was declared the legal equivalent of a person in a 19th-century US court decision — so what kind of person might the corporation be? A psychopath, according to the film’s analysis, a comparison that in the hands of a Michael Moore (who makes an appearance) might have been sardonic fun. Here it’s a bit of a rote lesson (the film is based on Joel Bakan’s earnest tome The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power). Things pick up in the second half, though, as the film delves into this psychopath’s prognosis, looking forward to the privatization of every commodity from drinking water to DNA to personal relationships. In short, the corporation will plunder the bodies, souls, and civil rights of the real persons it pretends to be in order to turn a profit. It may not be as flashy as Fahrenheit 9/11, but The Corporation comes closer to the true nature of the beast. (145 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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