Australian Centre for the Moving Image: Screening exclusively as part of the Melbourne Writer Festival, the episodic documentary Freakonomics: The Movie proves to be a perceptively entertaining mash-up of economic theory and documentary examination. The urge to discover, specifically the drive to identify causality, is important to both fields, and with a kind of supergroup of contemporary documentary directors involved the busy eye of the source material, the highly successful 2005 book Freakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner that applied economic theory to non-traditional subjects, is reflected in the diverse approaches to the source material.
The subjects examined by the book, such as the monetary vagaries of drug dealing or the socioeconomic patterns of child naming, are catnip to curious filmmakers, with four separate segments tied together by introductory and transitional footage directed by Seth Gordon (The King of Kong, Horrible Bosses) where the two authors discuss their work.
The choice of each director reflects their preoccupations and outlook: Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) opts to take up a look at cheating, initially in the field of Japanese sumo wrestling. 'Purity is a good mask for corruption," he notes, and he could be talking of any number of his former subjects. Gibney also chooses to veer further from the source material, using the revelation of cheating to examine how perceptions of legitimacy encourage dissolution (he sees a connection to America’s financial markets).
Gibney uses the book as a starting point, whereas Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold) happily dives into his subject, the long term impact of certain child names, teasing out the ideas with a pop mentality that alternates street vox pops and quirky representations of data graphics; the sombre cello score and archival material favoured by Gibney is nowhere to be seen. Spurlock looks at the bifurcation in names between white and African-American children since the late 1960s, revealing how certain names on the same CV draw less response from employers, while enjoying noting how Unique has been joined by Uneek and Uneque in the black community. Spurlock’s glibness is suited to the shorter length.
Notions of truth reoccur throughout Freakonomics. The movie suggests numbers can be both a revelatory weapon and source of unexpected disappointment – Levitt, who is fascinated by incentives, reveals at one point how it only took his three-year-old daughter three days to corrupt a scheme – candy for toilet training – he concocted. For the Chicago high school students followed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp), who have been offered $50 a month to keep their grades and attendances at a decent level, their desire for a reward can’t overcome bad habits built over years. Despite multiple inducements most can’t even make a go of school when they’re literally paid to.
Ewing and Grady spend time with the various students, catching illuminative interludes and a sense of the environment, but Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) is interested in how the book’s research impacts on social policy. Working with menacing animations and television clips, he breaks down Levitt’s theory as to why crime rates across America began to recede after December 1989. The answer is not merely the usual suggestions, including innovative policing, a stronger economy or higher incarceration rates, but the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalising abortion (Roe vs. Wade). That took away a generation of children, often to be raised by young and unprepared single mothers, from maturing in environments that nourished lawbreaking. 'They simply weren’t there to do the crime," observes the segment’s narrator, Mario Van Peebles.
Linking lower crime rates to freely available abortion is a controversial outcome, but like his fellow filmmakers Jarecki works from the steady foundation of Levitt and Dubner’s work. Some of the pieces could have spurred a feature-length investigation of their own, but the triumph of research over ideology and preconceived thought is suited to the portmanteau format. You don’t need a study to realise that combining four concisely informative documentary shorts raised from the same source material is a smart move.
