Russell Brand’s hazy agitprop

By Nicholas Barber

“Everything you’re going to hear about in this film, you already know.” So says Russell Brand at the start of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the excitable anti-banker agitprop documentary he has made with the director Michael Winterbottom. It’s a clever disclaimer. Brand immediately establishes that he hasn’t uncovered anything new about the Grand Canyon-like divide between rich and poor: he just wants to remind us that it’s okay to be angry about it. The problem for me, though, is that I’m a lot more ignorant about global financial shenanigans than Brand imagines. Like many people, I don’t know everything about off-shore tax havens and quantitative easing, and I was frustrated that “The Emperor’s New Clothes” didn’t enlighten me.

Framed by a white backdrop, and preaching to the viewer in close-up, Brand doesn’t present a single structured argument, as Michael Moore usually does. He and Winterbottom prefer a scattershot approach. They keep jumping from statistic to slogan to anecdote, interspersing their thoughts with flashing captions and very brief interview clips, and slotting in footage of Brand strutting around his Essex hometown, where various admirers and old mates remind us what a diamond geezer he is. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” undoubtedly gets across its message that the super-rich are horrible, and that they were allowed to become super-rich by Margaret Thatcher’s fondness for Milton Friedman. But as to how exactly Brand and Winterbottom think that happened, I’m no clearer now than I was before I saw the film.