There hasn’t been a comparable joker in the left-wing deck since Abbie Hoffman went underground. But while Hoffman played the media, Moore uses it to play fast and loose. Still, Sicko — which premiered last month at Cannes — shows America’s preeminent cine-muckraker in a seriously polemical mode. The Weinstein Brothers, who produced and are co-distributing Sicko, might have ripped off the title of one of their greatest hits and called it Scary Movie.
Sicko‘s opening gross-out features a guy suturing his own wound — but, as Moore points out, this movie isn’t about the 50 million Americans without health insurance. It’s about the 250 million Americans who do have coverage — like the 79-year-old guy working in a supermarket to maintain his prescription-drug benefits. The movie’s first half-hour is a virtual sideshow: Step right up and see the medically bankrupt couple forced to live in their daughter’s basement; the woman whose insurance carrier said she failed to get an emergency ambulance “pre-approved”; and the employee who lost her benefits because she didn’t report an ancient yeast infection as a preexisting condition.
Annotating these and other ghastly human-interest stories, Moore — who for much of Sicko is narrator rather than participant — adopts a tone dripping with sarcasm. He’s the P.T. Barnum of human misery, who, going back to Roger & Me, has never let details interfere with a good story. And yet, as Moore builds his case that health insurance in America is essentially a profit-making enterprise based on bilking the afflicted, the effect of his material is devastating.
Expert witnesses are called. A doctor tearfully testifies that, to fulfill her mandate as an HMO medical director, she’s withheld lifesaving services. Politicians are produced — not just Bush, always available for some idiotic comment, but even Hillary Clinton, whom Moore dresses down with the fury of a jilted lover — pointing out that, after the debacle of her 1994 bid for universal health coverage, she is now the no. 2 recipient of HMO donations.
After demonstrating the state of health care in America, Moore visits industrial societies that enjoy universal coverage — Canada, Great Britain (where even an American nincompoop who threw out his back trying to cross Abbey Road on his hands gets free hospitalization), and, above all, France. This love letter inspired a smattering of embarrassed applause at Cannes. But really, it should embarrass us. When Moore jokes that the wonders of the French health-care system were “enough to make me put away my Freedom Fries,” he’s obviously thinking about the health of the body politic rather than his own.
As filmmaking, Sicko sometimes resembles an infomercial for Ozark real estate. Elsewhere, it demonstrates a Kenneth Anger-like flare for vertical montage — as when Moore mischievously uses a jolly harvest hymn from the Stalinist musical Cossacks of the Kuban to sovietize our own marching firemen, heroic teachers, and indomitable mail carriers. In any case, it’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic. (In his most shameless stunt, the filmmaker “anonymously” bails out an anti-Moore website, paying the proprietor’s medical bills.)
Are Bush and Giuliani the only ones allowed to dial 9/11? Cleverer than either, Moore plays that card himself. In an already notorious PR provocation, he rounds up a crew of volunteer emergency workers with untreated respiratory problems and, in answer to some C-SPAN bragging about the excellent health care available to Gitmo prisoners, organizes a flotilla to the one place on “American soil” with free universal health care. The expedition never gets closer than the edge of the base, but they do experience the wonders of Cuban medicine — $120 inhalers for five cents, free dental implants, and a people’s hospital of cathedral-like splendor.
Sicko has the clearest agenda of any Moore film, albeit one that dares not speak its name. If the American health-insurance industry is Moore’s unspoken metaphor for capitalism (feeding vampire-like on human labor), Cuba is his unconvincing socialist paradise. Dr. Moore reveals all manner of symptoms — but is it impossible for him to diagnose the disaster we live without offering another sort of drug?
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2007.
I saw Sicko. It really isn’t well-represented by any reviewer’s comments that I’ve seen yet, including this one.
What it really is, sadly, is a diatribe against America, like the rest of Moore’s poorly-conceived films. He cherry picks story after story that truly are pathetic, but then suggests that in a nation of 300 million people these are common stories. They’re not; just look around you. Don’t look at the media, which is full of lies; look around YOU. Our country has the best health care in the history of the world and our capitalist system that Moore despises has delivered most of the world’s advances in medicine. I’d say we rejoin reality and acknowledge that we have it pretty good here in America. After all, I don’t see anyone trying to get out and I see billions that want to get in.
In the end, we’d all be better off if Moore became the one person that wants to leave America. Don’t waste your money on this one. I wouldn’t even recommend this for free from the library.
I saw Sicko last week and the entire theater clapped, laughed and cried through the whole movie with a standing ovation at the end. Why? We saw ourselves in those Moore profiled. I know plenty of people, including myself, with similar stories to those Michael highlighted that were denied coverage for ridiculous reasons or turned down for insurance altogether.
Moore did not make the movie to solve the problem, he made the movie to highlight the problem and spark a debate. Nobody begrudges profits for companies but how much profit is enough and at what cost to the common good? Do insurance company CEO’s need to make 22 million a year? These companies spend hundreds of millions to lobby Congress when they could be using that money to pay the claims they reject instead! It’s ridiculous.
A study from Harvard reports that 75% of all the bankruptcies in our nation are not from Best Buy shopping sprees but for medical reasons and 65% of those people have health insurance. If you have insurance you shouldn’t be forced to sell your house to make your copays or cover the medicine you need.
I don’t think Moore was promoting the Cuban model at all. His point is that Cuba is one of the poorest nations in the world led by a dictator and the WHO rates it’s healthcare at 39th…just two below the wealthiest nation on the planet, The United States. We should be ashamed and I think you need to re-review this movie with less of a ‘Get Michael Moore’ attitude and more attention to the very real issue he sheds light upon.