In this Indian summer of jobless recovery, is this economics doomsday doc too early or too late?

Collapse is an intriguing, topical documentary that might be coming out just a little early or a bit late. Director Chris Smith was researching a narrative about drug dealers when he came across Michael Ruppert, a former cop, noted conspiracy buff and unheeded Cassandra whose tiny newsletter predicted that fancy financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities were going to take down the US and global economy. He turned out to be right, and Smith found in interviewing Ruppert that there was a greater subject to be mined from what he originally thought was just another would-be expert on drugs and corruption within the LAPD.

At first glance, Collapse is an odd work coming from a filmmaker still most closely associated with the hilarious and intimate character study American Movie (1999), a comparative bear hug of a picture devoted to unskilled filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his undying dreams. Based primarily on a single multi-cam interview filmed in part by the great Ed Lachman, Collapse is cold, precise and stylistically very (if not overly) derivative of Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning The Fog of War. It’s an influence the filmmakers cheerfully acknowledge, but one that probably shouldn’t have extended all the way to a slavish imitation of Philip Glass’s arpeggio-laden score, an overworked trope that really should be banned from indie movies for at least the next 50 years. Like Morris’ work, which was essentially an illustrated and very detailed interview with Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara, the idea behind Collapse is to create an editorially intense look at one single human mind as it simultaneously grapples with vast issues and internal demons, and to use the subtleties of scoring and visual juxtaposition to immerse the viewer in another’s thought processes in an unobtrusive but potent way.

The cool Morris palette shows its strengths and its weaknesses in Smith’s capable hands. There are many moments of creeping intensity and catharsis in this portrait of Ruppert, and they sneak up on the viewer so stealthily that the reaction can be like the adrenaline jolt from a horror movie. There are other times when the refusal to allow another voice into the discussion lets dubious details hang, as when Ruppert alleges his publication was shut down by a break in from dark governmental powers he does not name, and a photo of smashed computers is allowed to stand unchallenged and uninvestigated as proof of Ruppert’s charges.

A challenger seems needed, because it does gradually dawn on the viewer that Ruppert is in the grip of a compulsion, and that as articulate and certain as he seems, there is a damaged and possibly unreliable narrator underneath. As Ruppert’s controlled exterior begins to crack under the polite but insistent scrutiny of Smith’s questions, the film’s title stands revealed as a double meaning: is it the collapse of an economy we’re watching, or the downfall of a paranoid mind?

This transformation of a human subject under the scrutiny of the lens is more riveting and accomplished than anything Morris captured in The Fog of War, and it also marks Collapse as an overt descendent of American Movie, which likewise investigated a man’s eccentricities as a way of understanding him. Though flawed a bit by the familiarity of its editorial grammar and visual palate, Collapse therefore deserves to be seen. But in this Indian summer moment of jobless recovery, has Smith entered the argument too long after the first shoe hit the floor? Or could it be that he’s just a bit too far ahead of another shoe waiting to so catastrophically drop?

Distributor: Vitagraph
Cast: Michael Ruppert
Director: Chris Smith
Producer: Kate Noble and Chris Smith
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 80 min.
Release date: November 6 NY