michael moore's SICKO (2007)

we'll start this where we need to: you already know what you think about Michael Moore. as Fahrenheit 9/11 and its accompanying controversy threatened to wholly commandeer the summer of 2004, it was hard not to take a stance on the portly provocateur, and thanks to his role as F9/11's cheeky protagonist/narrator, even discussion of the film itself eventually veered away from the culture of fear to a cult of personality figureheaded by a smiling, angsty film essayist in a dirty baseball cap. as with most consuming zeitgeists, retrospect reveals a truth somewhere in between the cries of "liar" and "saint"; the film was surely galvanizing and well-meant, but Moore's stagnant ironies and aw-shucks intellectual dishonesty make it hard to return to, as do painful memories of John Kerry's careful squandering of the resulting righteous indignance.

forget all that, though. with Sicko, his fifth nonfiction feature, Michael Moore has found a subject in full harmony with his self-image as a shit-stirring über-populist, approaching our desperately misshapen, ethically bankrupt health care system from an angle that eschews Right or Left, addressing us simply and directly as humans, and, what's more, Americans. where much of his recent work has favored a tone of glib anger, he here tempers his comedy with a quiet, moral sadness, and the result is by no small measure his most restrained, focused and affecting work to date, utterly engaging and enraging from its first frames.

the film opens (after a gem of a Dubya soundbyte) with a short collection of horror stories of the uninsured, including a man who was forced to choose which of two severed fingertips to reattach following an accident. (he opted for the cheaper of the two, paying $12,000 for a restored ring finger.) but this, as Moore soon informs us, is not a film about the uninsured – it's a film about the hundreds of millions of Americans who do have health insurance…and the surprising thinness of the line between the two.

indeed, the first act of Sicko dedicates itself to a devastating exposé of the insurance industry's cackling disdain for its preyed-upon policyholders, and Moore wisely focuses on the individual, from the "insured" (farce has rarely been so ruthlessly poignant as when Moore unshakily announces one woman's fate) to those who operate within the system, including a claims executive doing right by her conscience in front of a Congressional panel. naturally, though, the pols are in on the fix, as illustrated in a sequence detailing the bedroom antics of the medical industry and our legislative branch. (Moore, by the way, should go ahead and consider himself stricken from Hillary's Christmas card list.) this extended lament culminates in a succinct, razor-sharp montage deconstructing the insidious medical-industrial complex and its seemingly irrevocable role in American society, a sequence among Moore's very best work.

but what hope, then, do we have? most of the remainder of Sicko's running time finds Moore and his crew looking to our Western peers for answers. or, rather, one answer: forays to Canada, Britain, and France reveal socialized infrastructures in which all citizens are provided free medical care as a matter of course. such ideas are, of course, subject to scorn and ridicule in the United States, but as Moore affably badgers his way through emergency rooms and chemist's shoppes with wide-eyed incredulity, every bemused foreign smile suggests our own system as a sad, sick joke. no matter your familiarity with socialized medicine abroad, these trips hold some funny and thought-provoking moments, but the thrust of the sequence is consistent, and adamant: even our most staunchly capitalistic brothers and sisters around the world see universal healthcare as a clear moral and ethical imperative. even Moore's journey to Cuba with medically disenfranchised 9/11 workers depicts an obviously healthy government-run healthcare system, including a pharmacy where a cancer survivor is able to purchase her medicine for literally 1/2400th the price she pays in the United States.

this is strong stuff, but in the wrong hands (say, Moore's circa 2003) it might be just another entry in the string of activist nonfiction films for which Bowling For Columbine opened the floodgates – either narratively inert, fatally smug, or both. luckily, the determined humanism of this labor of love seems to have softened the Michael Moore we know and love to hate, or vice versa. Sicko does occasionally find him up to his old tricks, dabbling in ironic stock footage, clumsy pop music, and rhetorical silliness, but it's far less distracting here than in his previous work, thanks largely to a more careful attention to the ideas in play, and the proper way to string them together. he resists unnecessary rants and tangents, and downplays his own role in the proceedings; where Moore took center stage in Fahrenheit 9/11's struggle for truth and propriety, Sicko gracefully cedes the struggle to us, our families, and our friends, in a spirit of heartsick populism.

the film isn’t flawless – there’s a sour note toward the end regarding an act of charity, and the relatively unscathed pharmaceutical industry merited some of the running time reserved for his European jaunt – but it hits hard, and through its pessimism it is fundamentally right-minded. Sicko has, and fully earns, the power to put health care back at the forefront of our national dialogue, and wraps it in a devastating piece of entertainment. Michael Moore, you old buffoon, you done good.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)