At one point in my life, I worked at a Gap clothing store while heading my university's local branch of the Canada-wide international justice brigade known as WUSC. Colleagues at the latter did not understand how I could have a foot in each pool since Gap is a major retail corporation that flies in the face of our activist pursuits by allegedly encouraging the inexpensive exploitation of Third World labourers. Was this a fair criticism? Whether directly or indirectly, most of us cannot help but run into the monstrous capitalist giants known as corporations - which, according to an irrational aberration of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which provided for the freedom of slaves, have been granted legal status as individuals. Sometimes we even need them, if for nothing else but to supply us with meagre jobs and income (and the occasional perquisites, such as my 50% discount on clothes). This is something the makers of The Corporation, a 140-minute exposition on the demerits of Big Business and their crippling effects on human dignity and rights, understand all too well. It's not necessarily individual people who are expressly accountable, though each of our choices and actions certainly have an impact, but the collective corporate entities who blindly and single-mindedly pursue the acquisition of wealth. In what amounts to an arguably infallible and urgently assembled slice of leftist agitprop, directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott are critical of the larger problem of capitalist greed and the fate they believe it portends for global wellbeing, supporting their concerns with a surplus of startling evidence in a manner that is consistently balanced and engrossing.

The central idea that propels The Corporation is that, based on symptomatic criteria outlined by the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), corporations, if they may rightly be regarded as legal people, are categorically psychopathic in nature, flagrantly disregarding ethical and moral considerations as they tromp on the safety and lives of actual people. It's a simultaneously humourous and alarming observation, amusing at first but increasingly more disturbing the longer Achbar and Abbott continue. Among some of the more provocative case studies they dig up, we learn about IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany's Final Solution (they openly supplied the organizational materials used to tabulate and track the various categories of victims); Kathy Lee Gifford's infamous sweatshop scandal; the recent impetus on behalf of FOX News to cover up a story exposing the health hazards of Monsanto's bovine growth hormone; the violent protests over the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia; and finally, the movement toward patenting life itself. What's more is the directors tease us with brief mentions of other corporate crimes and sins before they delve full-force into one of the above examples. I'd have liked to discover more about such topics as nuclear waste and animal testing, which are flashed across the screen momentarily, but having come to expect the worst I'm sure the sad truth wouldn't surprise me.

As with all films of this sort, simply presenting us with information is only partly effective. Without solutions, viewers are likely to feel like the peak before them is too overwhelming to scale. For each of the horrors we bear witness to, Achbar and Abbott do little to galvanize viewers and imbue them with a sense of hope (something which Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore did exceedingly well in this year's similarly-themed documentary An Inconvenient Truth). The vague response put forth is that by availing ourselves of our democratic processes, we can demand injunctions and changes to policy that will turn things around for the better. Apart from a short profile of a quaint Californian town that has banned franchise stores from operating, as well as the violent resistance of citizens in Cochabamba, we're not entreated to any sort of workable or useful course of action for implementing needed changes. There is a sense that boycotting and voting with our dollars, even on an individual basis, can make a dent, but naturally with the looming crisis of Baby Boomer retirees and their lack of decent pensions (gone unmentioned in the film) threatening to deplete the workforce, dismantling capitalism outright would doubtlessly prove catastrophic to the economy beyond what is already grimly projected by analysts for the next 25-50 years. Corporations and the lifestyles inherent with them, I'm afraid, are here to stay.

Though they may not be the sort of people we would care to associate with, in the interest of inclusion we must work at living with corporations and learning from them. They can be rehabilitated, adapt, and improve, and raising public awareness about the numerous corruptions and crimes they commit is a good place to start, which is essentially what The Corporation aims for and succeeds at spectacularly. Perhaps now my employment with Gap can be reconciled with my support for WUSC, either as a necessary evil required to propel me in the right direction (an entirely cynical point of view), or an informed investment and affirmation of my faith that a corporation with its share of good qualities can do good without devious ulterior motives, provided conscientious people work there.