I should note that on my actual third day in Toronto, I saw two films that I’m not going to be able to write about on just one viewing: The Road and A Serious Man. If you follow my Twitter updates, you’ll know that I was blown away by the former and don’t know what to make of the latter. I know better than to try to waste words on first-blush reactions like that. I plan to catch up with both before their theatrical releases and will report back then.

So let’s skip straight to Sunday’s screenings. As mentioned previously, the “accidental” double feature is not an unusual phenomenon at TIFF, but I still didn’t wake up this morning expecting to see two one-note comedies about the odd symbiotic relationship between wealth accumulation, fabrication and faith. An even more surprising commonality between Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and The Invention of Lying starring/co-written and directed by Ricky Gervais, is that both feel in a way like huge-scale home movies. They tackle grand concepts from an ironic remove, and yet still leave the impression that their most important statements are about their makers.

Lying begins with a voiceover by Gervais, referring in the third person to his image on screen as that of a “chubby little loser.” Various variations of this epithet will be thrown at the Gervais character, a failing screenwriter named Mark, throughout the film; even his love interest, the lovely but shallow Anna (Jennifer Garner), tells him they can’t be together because she doesn’t want to spawn “little fat kids with snub noses.” Anna is brutally honest because everyone in Lying is — the film is set in an alternate universe version of a small American city in which not only does no one know how to tell a lie, but they’re moved to speak each truth that pops into their heads. So on Anna and Mark’s first date, Anna tells him over and over again that she’s there not because she finds him attractive, but because she’s afraid of dying alone. Their waiter greets them not with a welcome, but with the admission that he’s “very embarrassed to be working here.”

Turns out a world without bullshit is a glum one indeed. Unable to spice up his movie about the Black Plague with creative embellishment, Mark loses his job, and unable to make excuses about the rent, he faces eviction. He goes to his bank to withdraw the paltry remains of his account, when a crazy idea hits him: in a world of absolute truth, there is no disbelief, so if he tells the teller his account balance is higher than it is, she’ll probably give him what he asks for. She does, and this sets off a chain reaction of lies for the greater good. The trouble starts when Mark soothes the fears of his dying mother by telling her that she’ll live better in death than she did in life. With these lies about the afterlife spread, Mark accidentally invents an international cult that looks a lot like Christianity––to the point where the buildings erected for quiet contemplation of his “man in the sky” bear icons of Mark with his arms outstretched, not on a cross but presenting the pizza boxes on which he’s scrawled his prophecies. And still, Anna won’t date him. “Does being rich and famous change your genetic material?” she asks, without guile. He has to admit that it doesn’t.

Gervais and co-director/writer Matthew Robinson don’t exactly have infinite track to run with this premise, but they make the most of it, teasing both well-earned pathos and gut-busting laughs (the many indie A-list cameos help) out of the notion that humans naturally resist happiness. The mid-narrative segue into religious allegory is a bit rocky, perhaps because the rules of the game are so ill-defined––was there no religion whatsoever pre-Pizza Hut tablets, or no just no Christianity? Was there ever a human named Jesus Christ, and if his birth wasn’t an epochal, calendar-structuring event, then what bloody year is it? It’s more successful as a meditation on the paradox of success. Winning at one or two aspects of life may solve three or four problems, but it rarely if ever cures our biggest insecurities, and if the person you love prizes “genetic material” over all other attributes and yours doesn’t suit their fancy, there’s little your money can do to help you out with that.  By playing a chubby little man whose sense of himself as a loser can’t be changed by wealth and fame, he rips open potentially autobiographical wounds, and also exorcises them. But it’s hard to write this off as public therapy — The Invention of Lying is just too damn fun.

Similarly selective about its embrace of historical fact, Capitalism begins with a brilliantly edited montage equating our current state of despair with the fall of ancient Rome. This leads into a typically Moorean voiceover wondering what our civilization will be remembered for centuries after our demise: funny cat videos, or the forced evictions resulting from the mortgage crisis? The actual answer is probably either “both” or “neither,” but the question is a rhetorical device. Capitalism: A Love Story is primarily an examination of how the country’s romance with free markets spectacularly soured, and secondarily an ode to the ways in which the masses have made their heartbreak visible, including viral video. Moore wisely spends less time intervening into the action here than he did in Sicko, often letting public eruptions of frustration speak for themselves.

Early on, Moore admits that he, too, fell in love with post-war capitalism as a child, and that, even if it was made possible by a lack of global competition made possible by the United States’ military dominance, the system used to work pretty well for the average middle-class American. The problem is that there is no middle class anymore –– there is only, as one subject of the film puts it, “the people who got nothing and the people who have it all” –– and this Moore blames first on Ronald Reagan, who he slams as an actor-turned-pitchman-turned “spokesmodel as president,” then on the subsequent intermingling of Wall Street firms and government sectors. The film completely avoids the concept of personal responsibility, going out of its way to sell the notion that no intelligent human being could have been expected to understand the new financial instruments that governed the loans they signed their names to, thus ensuring that the predatory institutions and the congressional actions that bulldozed regulation to make way for them deserve the totality of the blame for the financial meltdown. It has become so bad, according to Moore, that pretty much every representative of the Catholic church that he could find in the midwest believes that contemporary capitalism is “evil.”

I wouldn’t expect a Michael Moore film to even attempt ideological balance, but the point to which Moore deliberately confuses the issues is remarkable. Beyond the deliberate muddying up of various explications of the jam we’re in, structurally, Capitalism is almost free-associative. A story of a corrupt, for-profit juvenile hall tracks into Sully Sullenberger’s congressional testimony on the broken airline industry, thanks to the wire-thin connection that a boy unjustly banished to said juvie wants to become a pilot; Moore then has to tread very carefully from there to make the point that salary cutbacks for pilots have a direct correlation to crashes. One wonders if Capitalism won’t look almost avant garde when seen decades removed from the Moore cult of personality, which has a tendency to make his work seem more commercial than it really is.

And yet, the film is still full of patented Michael Moore shtick — the star/director has a bullhorn in one hand, and the other is permanently poised over the kitschy stock footage button. A major misstep is starting the picture with the borrowed B-movie warning that what we’re about to see is “truly one of the most unusual movies ever made,” when in fact this director has made several employing the exact same methodology. But he also freely acknowledges that said shtick is reaching the limits of its effectiveness. After two decade, his filmmaking methods are essentially the same, only more so, and the problems depicted in Roger and Me still exist, only more so. “For twenty years,” he sighs, “I tried to warn GM and others that this was coming, to no avail.” He acknowledges that the public theater that has become his trademark is ineffective: “I’ve not been let into this building for twenty years,” he tells a guard at the bankrupt corporation’s headquarters. Later, he includes footage of an onlooker on Wall Street telling him to “Stop making movies. “I can’t keep doing this,” he tells us at the end of the film. “Unless you join me.” As long as this is meant as a general call to noisemaking and not to the stale rent-a-cop bullying that accomplishes nothing other than making this film a good 25 minutes too long, then I’m in full agreement.