This documentary film by director Robert Greenwald, also known for directing “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” (2004), describes the plight of those affected by the WalMart retail monopoly. This 98 minute, unrated film focuses on the personal experiences of those disenfranchised by the Wal-Mart corporation. Small business owners who have been put out of business by the neighboring superstore give plaintive interviews as they describe how Wal-Mart not only took most of their customer base and drove them out of business, but then as a side effect, how the corporation rendered a healthy downtown economy obsolete with their all encompassing inventory and low prices. The film then shifts gears to explain several reasons why Wal-Mart can afford such low prices. Both current and former employees from associates to managers give revealing interviews concerning the wages policy practiced by Wal-Mart. The unaffordable and inadequate healthcare plan offered by Wal-Mart as described in the employee interviews is juxtaposed with clips from Wal-Mart’s CEO Lee Scott paraphrasing Sam Walton’s philosophy that no employee should ever have to worry about not being able to pay for healthcare.
Greenwald intersperses clips from the evening news with interviews from employees to reveal how the corporation encourages employees to enroll in state assistance programs such as Medicaid and WIC to help them put food on the table and afford healthcare.
This film exhibits many other evils of the Wal-Mart corporation throughout the film; its calculating and financially exorbitant efforts to squash unionization plans among employees, its documented wage and hour abuses, institutionalized sexism and voluntary ignorance of incidents of racism among employees, the employment and subsequent exploitation of illegal immigrants, and the exploitation of factory workers in Bangladesh, Honduras and China are just some of the other issues presented in the film.
While this film supplies the viewer with shocking and sometimes jaw-dropping information, it does leave something to be desired. There seems to be little objectivity in this film. Presenting the audience with personal accounts of Wal-Mart’s negative effect on communities, small business owners and employees really works to capture ones attention, however I kept waiting to hear more from the other side of the issue, or at least to be given an understanding of the bigger picture. Numerous times in the film interviewees allude to the fact that the both the federal and local state governments have allowed Wal-Mart to violate the National Labor Relations Act, to repeatedly receive Clean Water Act violations and simply pay the mandated fines again and again, and have granted subsidies to Wal-Mart to aid in the construction of new locations. As a member of the audience I want to know more about government policy toward corporations such as Wal-Mart, why has this corporation gone unregulated, why is it allowed to monitor its employees with cameras and surveillance vans? This film does not answer a lot of the questions it raises leaving the viewer unsatisfied.
One other issue with the presentation of the film itself was the awkward segues between segments. Bold statements swirl onto the screen like newspaper headlines with phrases like, “Wal-Mart given subsidy again!” and “Family business threatened!”. Exclamations such as these along with esoteric facts such as, “Currently in the US there are 26,699,678 square feet of empty Wal-Marts, enough room to build 29,666 classrooms and educate 593,326 kids.” sensationalize the movie and detract from its credibility.
In conclusion, I would recommend this movie to someone interested in the social implications of Wal-Mart or of the corporation’s ethics, however I would not recommend this film for its economic or political content.
I am qualified to review this film because I enjoy documentaries and since becoming enrolled in the Library and Information Science program at UB I believe I have developed a more critical eye for evaluating all media; I have extended this skill to audio visual material such as films, news broadcasts (as we all know, one must be very critical of content and delivery depending on what news network one chooses to watch) and cable documentaries.
Links to reviews on Walmart:The High Cost of Low Price
