Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
One of the reasons I don’t get particularly excited one way or another about the release of a new Michael Moore film is because I know so much of the conversation about the movie won’t be about the movie. It can’t be about the movie, because the issues that the film addresses are so large that any two hour film is just barely going to be able to scratch the surface of the conversation that needs to happen if America is serious about taking care of its health care needs.
I’m reluctant to use the word “crisis.” I’m not sure I think there’s a health care “crisis,” but I might be willing to capitulate to a health care “massive clusterfuck.” I think that might be a slightly more accurate description of the state of things. Somewhere right now, Paddy Cheyefsky laughs and laughs at us, secure in the knowledge that he saw it all coming down Broadway. Media, health care, sports... he was the best of the social bullies, the writers who pushed a particular sort of dramatic moral agenda. I always get the sense that Michael Moore fancies himself the sort of rock star journalist that Hunter Thompson was during the days of the counterculture, the same sort that Murrow was in his day. I think he also has this profound need to cut his movies for the drama. I think he can’t resist the big gesture. I think he’s a shameless ham and a self-promoter, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that he deals with such important topics, and I think many audiences just sort of believe whatever the last thing they saw told them was true. I think as long as someone asserts something with authority, audiences pretty much take things as fact. When someone watches a “documentary,” they have a reasonable expectation that what they see is presenting a factual look at its subject. Or maybe a subjective look at the facts. Maybe that’s what Moore is really after. He’s got a fiction writer’s need to edit the story, to emphasize one fact or exclude another. And again... I’m not saying he’s wrong to do so. That’s who he is as a filmmaker. At his very best, he’s turned out work that mixed comedy and news at least as well as THE DAILY SHOW. For my money, I still think TV NATION and THE AWFUL TRUTH were the moments where Moore really hit on all cylinders.
SICKO is a better movie than either BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE or FAHRENHEIT 9/11, a more compassionate and human film than either of those. The self-aggrandizing is turned down a low hum in this film. Moore doesn’t even appear for about the first hour of the movie. He speaks occasionally in voice-over, but for a while, he’s content to just let people tell their own stories. And they are certainly affecting. When he starts telling horror stories about people trapped in the health care system in America, I think it’s smart stuff. Maybe the single best choice he makes in the film is focusing on the people in the system instead of those outside of it. It’s a given that life absolutely sucks for anyone unable to get health care in this country, but Moore has wisely decided to show how it can be just as big a nightmare for people who have insurance, who feel like they should be taken care of, but who aren’t. I think if SICKO was just a film about our own problem and the various human faces that Moore puts on it, it might be his best film.
But no. Instead, he chooses to do something in the second half of the film that pretty much derails it for me. It’s true that America ranks low on the list of Western countries in terms of how well our health care system works, but when Moore travels to Canada or to France or to England or to, God help him, Cuba in order to make that point, he can’t resist that urge of his I mentioned earlier. By including certain things and excluding others, Moore gives all the ammunition to his critics that they would ever need to discredit him. Canada does indeed have socialized medicine, and it’s not a terrible system. But Moore makes it look like paradise here. Same with England. Same with France. And, yes, same with Cuba. And I’m sorry... but anyone who paints Cuba as a paradise in any social regard is not playing fair. I’ve known many Cubans over the years, both living in Tampa and living here in LA, and many of the people I know have lived in Cuba and have family there still. And the Cuba that Moore presents in this movie is, as best I can tell, a fiction. I think that the individual people he shows are real, and I was moved by the scene involving the Cuban firemen meeting the American rescue workers. But if Michael Moore honestly thinks that everyone in Cuba... each and every citizen... is being given the quality of health care that he presents in his film... then he’s a fool. And if he doesn’t believe it, then he’s a liar. And either way, I’m distressed by the material in the movie.
I wish I loved SICKO unreservedly, because I think there are things in this movie that every American should see. I think there is a conversation to be had, and I think Moore has offered an interesting way to start that conversation. But the film could have been so much more, and I’m afraid that Moore has become one of those filmmakers who is unable to keep himself from ruining his own work at this point. SICKO is flawed but fascinating, a mix of the naïve and the absolutely right. It is, in all ways, a Michael Moore film, and I wish he was growing as a filmmaker instead of settling into familiar tricks. At this point, I guess a film of his that plays fair for at least half its running time is all I can ask.
I just wish that weren’t the case.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
