Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
7/16/07
**POLITICAL OPINION WARNING:
if you're one of those people inclined to write letters to editors demanding
that their critic “Just review the movie” rather than offer political opinions,
read no further. Michael Moore's documentaries are political Rorschach
Tests, and barely even exist outside the personal biases of those viewing
them.**
I haven't written a word
yet, but since this review already includes the words “Michael Moore” twice,
you've probably got a pretty good idea of where you stand on Sicko.
I've never met anyone who says “Michael Moore? Ah, I can take him
or leave him.” Granted, I know some (even myself to a certain degree)
who love his films but would never want to be seated next to America's
#1 Self-Promoter on a bus. Either way, just about everybody who knows
his work falls into one of two camps. Michael Moore is either:
1)A fat-assed traitor, or 2)A modern day Thomas Payne with the guts to
say what nobody else in the media will. Count me in the later camp.
I know his methods are pure Propaganda 101, but in a time when our media
has boiled almost everything down to tossing out an issue and letting two
bought-and-paid-for talking heads call each other names over it, it's excited
to see someone really advocate their position on an issue. Say what
you will about Sicko, but you won't find too many of the elites
in either political party calling for socialized medicine these days.
And if even 1/3 of what Moore's got to say is true, they damn well should.
First, Moore (as always,
our tour guide) introduces us to a few people with no insurance (the guy
doing his own stitches made me want to faint), but assures us that the
movie is not about them. Instead, he moves on to interview people
with insurance who've been royally screwed. There's the guy whose
daughter was approved for a Cochlear Implant in one ear, but told a second
would be “experimental”. And the woman whose insurance was retroactively
canceled after her surgery had been paid for because she never mentioned
on her application that she'd once had a yeast infection. We meet
people involved in the process, who tell us that Insurance companies (Moore
hits HMOs hard and never really draws a distinction between the different
kinds of insurance) have employees specially trained to sort through your
history and find unrelated reasons to cancel your coverage rather than
pay. Some states even have laws allowing them to cancel coverage
if you had symptoms “a reasonable person” would have gone to the doctor
for before applying for insurance. He takes us on a few trips back
in time, to listen to an old AMA record with actor Ronald Reagan “speaking
out” against Socialized Medicine and Nixon tapes that reveal the very origins
of the HMO (damning, damning stuff, especially when he contrasts it with
Nixon's very different public comments on the same subject the following
day). Then, he hops on a few planes and takes us to other countries
to look at their health care systems. Nobody pays (well, aside from
the taxes that finance these systems), everybody gets treated, and the
long lines we're told about don't exist. Canadian and English systems
seem pretty cool (and I LOVED the stories about the post-WWII origins of
Britain's system). The French are a little over-the-top with their
tons of paid vacation, government-provided nannies and public protests
to keep “The First Day of the Pentecost” as a paid holiday (more on them
later). But why don't we have systems like this? To illustrate
the power of insurance lobbyists over our government, Moore tells us two
stories. First, there's the Clinton-era attempt at universal health
insurance, which died under a mountain of spin and money, money which now
makes its' architect Hilary Clinton the #1 Democrat in Insurance campaign
contributions. And then there's the Federal Prescription Drug Plan,
which he depicts as a direct hand-off of our tax dollars to pharmaceutical
companies by way of the insurance industry. But there is one place
on US soil, he tells us, with socialized medicine: the terrorist
detention center at Guantanamo Bay. So, he loads up a boat full of
people we've already met, including some 9-11 First-Responders denied benefits
because they weren't US employees when exposed to toxic chemicals at Ground
Zero, and heads there to try and get them help. When that doesn't
work out, he tries the next best thing, sneaking them into Cuba to be treated
by their government health care system.
Much has been made of the
notion that Sicko presents a kinder, gentler Michael Moore, and
it does. Gone are the ambushes and the stunts (the “visit” to Guantanamo
is clearly staged for the cameras, and I'd be shocked if anyone there was
ever even aware that he was outside their waters filming): no attempt
to get Congressmen to send their sons to Iraq this time. Instead,
we get a steady stream of persuasive interviews with likable, sympathetic
people and historical background that together build a very strong, very
emotional case that the US Health Care system has little concern about
whether its' customers live or die just as long as it makes money (And
Richard Nixon apparently had none at all). Does it tell a complete,
balanced story? Of course not. I'm no expert beyond the fact
that I read the newspaper, and even I know that his vision of France as
a Worker's Paradise never gets around to mentioning that those perks only
apply if you can find a job, which has proven particularly difficult for
young and minority job-seekers in recent years precisely because their
system pretty much requires dynamite to get someone out of a job they've
already got. And it's more than a little disingenuous to suggest
that the only problem with Fidel Castro is that he's a dictator we don't
like as opposed to one we do. He'd crucify that kind of “The enemy
of Bush is my friend” logic if it was coming the opposite way. And
it's a good thing he finally gets around to pointing out Hilary Clinton's
place in Big Pharm's pocket, because an earlier sequence where he gushes
on and on about how she exploded onto the scene upon her husband's election
plays like a Clinton 08 campaign commercial (and the part where he calls
her “sexy” made me a little ill). But Sicko's devil is NOT
in the details, and to focus too closely on them misses a fairly obvious
Big Picture.
In fact, I'm not sure the
movie's really even all that much about Health Care in the end. Moore
goes back again and again to the notion that American workers are increasingly
prisoners of debt for things other countries get out of their tax dollars,
from their student loans forward. Think about it: when you
daydream about quitting your job, what is more likely to stop you, worrying
about finding the same salary somewhere else or the same health insurance?
And if you “need this job” to stay healthy... what employer could ask for
more? Americans spend a lot of their political time obsessing over
things that will never touch them personally. How many will ever
want an abortion, lose a job based on the presence or absence of affirmative
action or participate in a gay marriage compared to the number who will
at some time need health insurance? But the things that could unite
us, the improvements that would make ALL our lives better, have a way of
staying off the radar while we look at the guy across the street, mutter
“he wants my stuff!” and look to some oily loser to get elected to Congress
and save us from him. Sicko, at the end of the day, is really
a call for people to join together, the way people in other countries either
do or have in the past, and demand the things from our government that
we all need. An American expatriate in France characterizes a difference
between the countries: the French government is afraid of its' people,
while the American people are afraid of our government.
Content aside, Moore really
knows how to present his information in a fast and entertaining manner.
He himself is a jocular, easy on-camera presence, with good comic timing
and the ability to turn from jokester to sympathetic ear on a dime.
And he's really good at using archival footage to underscore his points,
particularly when he uses it to mock his subjects. When Reagan's
old speech about how socialized medicine will be but the first step in
a plan where “soon a whole lot of other things will be socialized” until
we're all living under Soviet dictatorship is matched with 50's-era Red
Scare images, the result is hilarious. And while it doesn't take
much to make politicians look like idiots, he's just as good as Jon Stewart's
Daily Show crew at editing together their public statements to show
how empty and scripted they really are.
I liked Sicko a lot,
it made me laugh, care and think, and for all the horror stories it contains,
it made me feel optimistic. And not just because of its' As Good
As it Gets-like climax where all the sick people finally get diagnoses
and cheap medication, but because of its' overriding sense that it would
be so simple to knock our country back on the right track. It's certainly
not the end of its' discussion, but a good place to start. And for
that reason alone, I'm glad we have Michael Moore. Just as long as
he doesn't sit next to me on a bus and start telling me how the government
tried to stop the movie from being released because he went to Cuba.
Save that story for Hilary, if she's still returning your calls. |
