Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has effectively made mincemeat of his targets in a couple of recent fiery documentaries - Rupert Murdoch and the FOX Network in "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", and the Bush administration in "Uncovered: The War on Iraq". His latest is no exception as he lays into Wal-Mart, its CEO Lee Scott and Sam Walton's heirs in this probing 2005 critique of corporate injustice. Instead of providing a single narrative voice, Greenwald structures his film as a series of vignettes focusing on discrete instances of where Wal-Mart has violated fair market practices, passed over women and minorities for leadership positions, restricted movements toward employee unionization, taken advantage of cheap labor in China and India, and disregarded environmental standards.

The grievances seem endless, and the film even discloses the embarrassingly paltry amounts each Walton family member has given to charitable causes (compared to Bill Gates, of course). The most touching episodes focus on victims like Red Esry, who are experiencing the closure of their multi-generational small businesses in small towns where Wal-Mart opens and cannibalizes the competition. Much of the treatment seems ham-fisted, especially in the juxtaposition of Wal-Mart commercials and in-house training videos within the context of those being crushed by the corporation's economic clout. Moreover, the one segment about the rape of an employee in a parking lot, while horrific, seems more generic in nature than Wal-Mart's accountability in the incident. The abundance of conjecture and the lack of attributable facts tend to affect some of the film's credibility.

However, Greenwald makes his points with clarity. Especially effective is the use of archived footage of Scott asserting to a massive audience of his employees that Wal-Mart has done nothing but good for the economy, even though many of them have to go on welfare to get medical care. The film ends with a montage of people who have successfully lobbied against the construction of stores in their towns. At the same time, Greenwald has not made a monomaniacal diatribe, as the takeaway never feels like the destruction of Wal-Mart but more a call for a severe overhaul of their internal practices. The filmmaker has certainly come a long way since his 1980 feature film debut, the ludicrous "Xanadu", and he seems to be continuing his streak of confronting those corrupted by their power.

The DVD has several extras, the best being a twenty-minute making-of featurette and a separate 16-minute short, "The Big Meeting", on how the film came about. Greenwald also provides a commentary track, though much of what he shares can be gleaned from the featurettes. There are a couple of deleted segments that do seem redundant if they were included in the movie (one set in Quebec, the other in England), as well as a brief clip of local religious leaders condemning Wal-Mart's practices. Lastly, there are several fitfully funny Wal-Mart commercial parodies that apparently served as commercials for the documentary. Those looking for a more-in-depth analysis of Wal-Mart's business impact may want to read Charles Fishman's "The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy".