First the bad news,
courtesy of Patrick Creadon's alarming new documentary I.O.U.S.A.: Our country is
drowning in a flood of debt of near-biblical proportions. We're talking
trillions of dollars. Thanks to centuries of gross fiscal irresponsibility, the
budget deficit is enormous and steadily spiraling out of control. Its vastness
and the short-sided myopia of our current leaders, especially the free-spending
warriors in the White House, pose a dire threat to the economic health of
future generations. Now the good news: Well, there really isn't any good news,
except that if we embrace belt-tightening and financial discipline, our
economic future might look mildly less cataclysmic than it does today. How's
that for a pick-me-up?
Using an avalanche of
charts, statistics, and talking heads, Creadon traces the alarming rise of the
national debt, from the Revolutionary War to the current fiscal crisis.
Creadon's heroes are a smattering of numbers-crunching, pencil-necked geeks
committed to alerting an oblivious, apathetic nation that unless we change our
ways, we're headed toward a bleak future that'll make the Great Depression look
like a minor cash-flow crisis.
If anyone can make
this kind of grim subject material palatable to a mass audience, it'd seemingly
be Creadon, whose breezy, enjoyable crossword-puzzle documentary Wordplay was a sleeper hit. But
Creadon doesn't sugarcoat a very real, little-discussed catastrophe in the
making. All the sugar in the world wouldn't make his frightening conclusions
any easier to swallow. Though the filmmaking is playful at times, the film is
essentially 90 percent message, 10 percent movie. Then again, sometimes a
message is important enough to make other considerations seem irrelevant.