GENERATION WEALTH: More Money, More Problems

I don’t know if I had a more anticipated film this year than Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth. Her first feature since 2012’s The Queen of Versailles, for my dollar one of the best films of our young century, through a personal examination of the director’s work the film offered a chance to check in on the acceleration of the country’s descent into oligarchical rule and the consequences upon society.

Generation Wealth sets up quite the challenge for itself, attempting to condense 25 years of artistic achievement into a feature length film, all the while presenting both autobiography and cultural critique. The film might be classified as a living retrospective, conflating past and present and constantly shifting its focus both in subject and chronology. If that sounds like a daunting task that’s because it is, and though it frequently shines in moments of quiet insight, the film largely struggles to stand up under the weight of its ambitions.

Specious Solutions

In its wide and varied subject matter, Generation Wealth is perhaps most valuable for its subjects, who through Greenfield‘s latest endeavor are given a chance to reflect upon formative moments in their lives. Many seem to arrive at personal revelations, while others are still bragging about how hot their high school girlfriends were. Though it feels like the world has changed drastically in the past 25 years, this film shows how stagnant it’s been as well, displaying something like intensified sameness.

Greenfield, aided by four veteran editors, retains the acerbic cut characteristic of her previous work. Interviews in the film are allowed to breathe beyond mere answers to the director’s questions and alluding to her personal views about her subjects, which run the gamut from derision to empathy. The dynamic between these reactions is one of the most interesting things about this film; documentaries have been called “empathy machines”, and Versailles was a terrific example of how that works even in dealing with people with whom it’s almost impossible to identify. Here though, the relatively short and interspersed time we spend with the film’s various denizens feels much more superficial, and it’s consequently harder to get past the initial feelings of antipathy towards the ultra-rich as their stories coalesce into a portrait of our current anarcho-capitalist hellscape.

And it is in dealing with the zeitgeist that the film veers off the rails. After spending most of its time making me feel like the world is coming to a lavish, gold-plated end and all that can be done is to tilt at windmills, Greenfield fails to offer any indictment of the systems that allow for the unchecked accumulation of wealth. Instead we get a center-liberal call for a return to family and nature, as if individual actions and attitudes are responsible for epidemic inequality and the wholesale commodification of women, and a shifting in values is all that’s needed to correct course. Without a condemnation of the structures of economic oppression, opting instead to scapegoat cultural fare like Keeping Up With the Kardashians and choosing an ending that purports to be hopeful despite all that led up to it, Generation Wealth ends up feeling toothless, if not a little confused. It would have been better to present all that the film does and not purport to offer a solution at all, allowing the audience to meditate on the issues it presents rather than wrestle with its problematic resolution.

Talk About Getting Lost In Your Work!

Among Generation Wealth‘s myriad subjects and topics, there were a few that hinted at the distilled absurdity of Greenfield‘s seminal prior film. I was particularly taken with the segment, derived from a series of web shorts she did, on China’s new upper-class and their wading into American-style performance of wealth. But the film is strongest in a middle portion demonstrating how capitalism hits women the hardest; from surrogacy to child-pageants, the director effectively addresses contemporary gender apartheid. It could have easily been the focus of the entire film, were its goals not so broadly distributed.

Greenfield herself becomes tangled in the web she’s woven as she attempts to find a space for her own narrative to occupy within the framework of the film. Attempts to draw parallels between her devotion to her work and that of her subjects ends up feeling misplaced and besides the point, and does little more than to extend the film’s runtime. It’s admirable that a documentarian would try to exhibit some self-awareness in a retrospective of a career predicated upon looking outward, but for that very reason it also works to the film’s detriment, forcing Generation Wealth to contend with a premise based on contradictory themes.

In considering Generation Wealth, I often found myself thinking about another recent film made by a female photographer than combined career retrospective with personal narrative and existential treatise, Kirsten Johnson‘s Cameraperson. A film that also covers decades of achievement behind the camera, Cameraperson was able to present a unique mediation on its director’s motivations in a way that felt holistic and unified narratively, whereas Generation Wealth often feels like a series of segments loosely threaded together. I’ve been a fan of Greenfield‘s for a long time, and over her career she has presented a range of social and economic maladies with depth and nuance. Perhaps it’s due to the burden of my own excited expectations, but ultimately the sum that is Generation Wealth is never able to surpass its 25 years of parts.

Is Generation Wealth worth its weight in gold? What are your favorite works of anti-capitalist cinema?