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Canwest News Service
The Yes Men are a New York City-based consortium – well, it's two guys – who are against globalization but in favour of madcap hoaxes: Borat meets Michael Moore, essentially. The Yes Men Fix The World is the second documentary (The Yes Men came out in 2004) that follows them as they do their thing, which is to appear in shirt and tie at conferences and perpetrate frauds on the businessmen there, thus exposing capitalism for what it is, i.e., a system that supports a lot of conferences.
Some of this is funny, some of it bombs, but all of it helps illuminate the excesses of an economy in which profit is everything. Thus, in their biggest hoax to date, Andy Bichlbaum goes on BBC television as "Jude Finisterra," spokesman for Dow Chemical, to announce that 20 years after the Bhopal disaster – an explosion at a pesticide factory that killed 5,000 people, made more than 100,000 permanently ill, contaminated the local water system, and caused lasting environmental damage – Dow was going to pay $12 billion to compensate the victims.
"The shareholders will take a hit," Finisterra announced, but everyone would be happy to be doing the right thing at last.
Well, they weren't really. Dow stock lost $2 billion in value in 23 minutes: the system, the Yes Men had shown, was set up so that humanitarian behaviour is not rewarded.
Meanwhile, of course, the people of Bhopal had been given false hope, which is the chief criticism made of the Yes Men and their pranks. The movie shows, however, that the victims – in Bhopal and later in New Orleans, when Bichlbaum poses as a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official and announces that public housing that was closed by Hurricane Katrina would finally be reopened – welcome the attention. "Totally worth it," says a Bhopal health care worker.
The Yes Men Fix The World combines this footage with critiques of the system, narrated by Mike Bonnano, the other Yes Man. Much of this has to do with the free market philosophy of Milton Friedman, whose acolytes and supporters – a roster that includes an amusingly earnest Arnold Schwarzenegger – say things like "most problems will solve themselves if ignored" and "global warming is silly. It's not a serious issue."
This isn't quite as telling as it's meant to be, partly because the Yes Men stunts often misfire. Bichlbaum and Bonnano, who disguise themselves in ordinary business suits and bland business personalities, come up with outrageous ideas – an oil company scheme to turn dead bodies into biofuel called Vivoleum, or the SurvivaBall survival suit that protects wearers from everything from leaping out of buildings to being immersed in water by bouncing to safety – but their audiences look mostly baffled or dubious. A few take the bait, but their reactions are never as enthusiastic as they would have to be for the hoaxes to be truly funny.
"Had we actually made the oil people think about what they were doing?" asks Bonnano, being hustled from the Calgary conference hall where Vivoleum made its half-baked debut. Probably not.
Last year, the Yes Men published 100,000 copies of a mock edition of the New York Times filled with the news they felt people wanted to hear (main headline: Iraq War Ends.) It just shows that you can't believe everything you hear at a conference, or read in the newspapers, even though sometimes you wish you could.
For Jay Stone's weekly movie podcast, go to www.canada.com/moviereviews.
jstone@canwest.com
canada.com/stonereport
CAPSULE REVIEW – The Yes Men Fix The World: The Yes Men are two New York City-based activists who disguise themselves in business suits and infiltrate company meetings to pose as outrageous capitalists. They're anti-globalization hoax artists – Borat meets Michael Moore – who present strange ideas to legitimate businessmen and film the results. They're not quite as hilarious as the movie wants them to be, but it's an ingenious method of critiquing the problems of the profit-at-all-costs system. Rating: three stars out of five – Jay Stone.
