A little more than a month ago the lefty press—and plenty of mainstream media outlets—were united in hyping Robert Greenwald's film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.

As you surely know by now, Wal-Mart is much more than a place to stock up on Spamouflage. The chain superstore is a paradigm of the new service economy, and attacking its business practices has become a convenient means of addressing political questions too often obscured by wars on terror and Christmas. The company shines a spotlight on the way we alternate between identifying as customers and as citizens: Wal-Mart gives us what we want (low prices) and what we despise (low wages, workers who are unable to afford health insurance, over-reliance on Chinese imports).

But from watching Greenwald's film, you'd never know we're anything but victims of Wal-Mart's predations. Its polemical strategy is indistinguishable from the pedagogy of South Park's Mr. Mackey: "Kids, Wal-Mart is bad, mmmkay?"

In this worldview, Wal-Mart is a pestilence no right-thinking American could possibly want, much less "choose." Punting historical context to the curb, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price gives us sniffle-inducing montages of boarded-up main streets, family hardware stores going out of business, and vulgar intertitles with thundering statistics on Wal-Mart's reliance on taxpayer largesse.

In an effort to show it's not just the usual lefty suspects beefing about Wal-Mart, Greenwald introduces us to small businessmen being muscled out of their market share who actually—get this—vote Republican. One Wal-Mart critic, sporting a hat littered with military insignia, salutes the camera, flags aflutter in the background. Sadly, these snippets have all the authenticity of John Kerry's goose-hunting trip.

Absent from the conversation is any version of the following question: How do progressives—for that is the target audience—deal with the fact that Wal-Mart appears to offer poor people a lot more than, um... progressives? If you're poor and need a check cashed, you'll never pay more than $3 at a Wal-Mart. Need to wire money? Wal-Mart will cut you a better deal than Western Union. Couple Wal-Mart's low prices with its push into urban centers that had long ago been abandoned by grocery chains and you'll find huge populations largely disinclined to hate on the Wal.

This isn't to say Greenwald isn't right to take the company to task—but insisting that Wal-Mart is evil dilutes the complexity of this unique social problem. In the feel-good conclusion Greenwald turns the camera on communities who've successfully kept Wal-Mart out. What's never mentioned is that citizens in these towns learned that staying Wal-Mart-free means not turning their fight into a Wal-Mart-bashing carnival. Rather, beating Wal-Mart means sticking to unsexy issues like traffic studies, tax incremental financing schemes, and county master plans.

The burgeoning anti-Wal-Mart movement is way too important to be squandered in simplistic agitprop. Want to understand Wal-Mart? Treat yourself to South Park's "Something Wal-Mart This Way Comes." In one-third the time it makes a more complex argument, accompanied by generous lashings of exploding poop.

John Dicker is the author of The United States of Wal-Mart (2005).