The practices outlined in Maxed Out will make your skin crawl, and yet, it's doubtful that any of it will come as a surprise. Not at the college campuses where credit card companies recruit new customers too young and inexperienced to know about financial responsibility. Not in households where lending offers arrive for family members who are disabled or dead.

And not for the debt collectors who hound and harass delinquent customers. Jerry Falwell prescribes tithing as God's solution to financial woes. But our nation in its fundamentalism has forgotten what Christianity (or Judaism and Islam, for that matter) says about such lending. In The Inferno, Dante damned usurers to the seventh circle of hell.

Scurlock would do the same, although his case is poorly organized, even sloppy. The subtext here is that Americans are too stupid to understand how lending works, but rather than craft the documentary as a useful teaching tool, he treats it as an angry indictment of predatory lending practices (he openly mocks educational attempts by playing a kitschy 1960 filmstrip called "The Wise Use of Credit"). But such a discussion isn't particularly cinematic to begin with, and none of the credit-card bigwigs agreed to be interviewed. Since Scurlock isn't nervy enough to show up at their offices anyway, a la Michael Moore, he opts for a personality-driven approach instead.

Maxed Out doesn't fault consumers. After all, they're simply taking President Bush's advice to spend. The film attributes three suicides to credit-related debt and suggests others would sooner surrender their lives than repay their bills. But surely education would be a more effective solution than industry reform -- and Maxed Out misses the opportunity to make that point.
[as featured in The Fort Worth Star Telegram]