i have no idea why the title is spelled the way it is, but this is a damn fine movie. unlike bowling for columbine and fahrenheit 911, it’s nicely organized and focused, so you don’t have to spend precious mental energy figuring out how we got to Z from X and Y. the first part is devastating. the most devastating part is that you know everything about it. you have heard the stories, you know people who have gone through that, you know that, but for your nice university job if you are lucky enough to have one, you would be going through that too. you know all of this because it is your waking nightmare. you live under the constant threat that it might, that it will one day happen to you.
at least i do. more than any filmmaker, writer or living human being, moore captures everything that terrifies me about living here. the endemic, brutal violence (bowling for columbine), the endemic, vicious political corruption, the corporate omnipotence, the permanent state of fear. let me hear one more person make fun of italy for its political corruption. just one more.
the fear, in particular, is something to which moore returns film after film. in a telling scene with american expats living in france, a black woman (a fortuituous touch for which moore must have thanked his lucky star) says, “in france, the government is afraid of the people, in america, the people are afraid of the government.” can you imagine this government being afraid of the people? what people?
in the second part, moore puts on the comic relief, emphasis being, for those of us who are europeans and still hold european passports, on relief. because we can go back. should we, godforbid, get cancer, diabetes, or alopecia areata, we can hop on a plane and hightail it to one of our decrepit, crazy, but blissfully free hospitals.
simon and i were the only people in the theatre who laughed and laughed and laughed. pathetic how little it takes to feel proud of your country.
true, moore depicts canada, england, and france as veritable health-care paradises, which they might not be, exactly. having experienced both systems though, i’ll have to say that, compared to here, they come pretty damn close. (just like moore’s canadian relatives, my mother won’t be caught dead on american soil without having bought expensive health insurance, due to expire two days after she goes back, just in case there’s a flight delay).
i am going to let you imagine the dead stone quiet that descended on our fine miami audience when moore depicted cuba as a veritable health-care paradise. prudently, we suppressed our laughter.
oh, and i think that, unless she announces on her website that her hmo funding is going back to the last penny, hillary clinton has lost whatever tenuous grasp her femaleness still had on my first ever vote. oh, shucks.
as a political agitator, moore can’t be beat. for most of us, this will not be informative (well, apart from the bit about nixon and ehrlichman). unfortunately, it will be very informative for the majority of americans, if they bother to see it. i hope they do. it may be wishful thinking on my part (and why not? it’s the only thing we’ve left), but this may alter the tone of the election, at least for the democrats.
the mic to you, gentlemen. tear this movie apart.
david denby takes a contrary view that i am sympathetic to without having seen the film–because it sums up my ambivalence towards moore from bowling for columbine onward. from denby’s review:
i’ll watch this when it comes to dvd, but i have to say i have very little patience for moore anymore. i don’t like windbaggy, attack-dog rhetoric on the right, and see no reason why i should tolerate it on the left.
I thought this was a great picture, too. Perhaps Moore’s best (since “Roger and Me”, when it was all new and fresh), though with the least “political theatre.” The attempt to enter Guantanamo was good, but didn’t involve any personal confrontation.
I think one way in which, if people see it, it might do something is simply in showing what somewhere else is like. So many people just cannot imagine that things can be OK outside of the US. Of course, you see these places in ordinary movies, but we don’t, usually, look to those movies for that kind of experience, and when we do, it’s likely to get experience about some third world hell-hole (I’m thinking of that heart-wrenching movie “Osama”, for example.) Here, just to see the hospitals, and the people in them, in other countries, and to see their condescending, pitying expressions at the fact that in the US we pay for so much stuff they get for free, may have a salutary effect. At least I hope so.
Re Arnab’s points. It’s true that he doesn’t look at recent plans for health-care reform. I haven’t followed their details, but I’m under the impression that they all still involve large roles for insurance companies, etc. So I’m not so sure Moore’s film has become obsolete before it even opened.(Plus, these things are plans – there’s going to be a hell of fight actually to get anything done, so his movies might be very timely, in fact.)
I also dislike (even left-leaning) windbaggery. I can’t listen to Air America, for example. And Moore is sometimes like that. I don’t think he is here too much though (perhaps this is connected to the absence of so much of the theatrical element in this movie). But as for treating the audience condescendingly, all I can say is that the American people elected Bush twice (sort of); so they can’t be all that smart!
(Resubmitting this because it didn’t go through the first time)
I thought this was a great picture, too. Perhaps Moore’s best (since “Roger and Meâ€, when it was all new and fresh), though with the least “political theatre.†The attempt to enter Guantanamo was good, but didn’t involve any personal confrontation.
I think one way in which, if people see it, it might do something is simply in showing what somewhere else is like. So many people just cannot imagine that things can be OK outside of the US. Of course, you see these places in ordinary movies, but we don’t, usually, look to those movies for that kind of experience, and when we do, it’s likely to get experience about some third world hell-hole (I’m thinking of that heart-wrenching movie “Osamaâ€, for example.) Here, just to see the hospitals, and the people in them, in other countries, and to see their condescending, pitying expressions at the fact that in the US we pay for so much stuff they get for free, may have a salutary effect. At least I hope so.
Re Arnab’s points. It’s true that he doesn’t look at recent plans for health-care reform. I haven’t followed their details, but I’m under the impression that they all still involve large roles for insurance companies, etc. So I’m not so sure Moore’s film has become obsolete before it even opened.(Plus, these things are plans – there’s going to be a hell of fight actually to get anything done, so his movies might be very timely, in fact.)
I also dislike (even left-leaning) windbaggery. I can’t listen to Air America, for example. And Moore is sometimes like that. I don’t think he is here too much though (perhaps this is connected to the absence of so much of the theatrical element in this movie). But as for treating the audience condescendingly, all I can say is that the American people elected Bush twice (sort of); so they can’t be all that smart!
i hereby promise i’ll joyfully forswear michael moore, curse his name forever, and give 10% of every paycheck i’ll ever earn to moorewatch.com if his attack on america’s healthcare turns out to be superfluous in my lifetime.
as my pal dave says:
Let’s give it to J. Hoberman . . . hey, he likes it . . . hey hoby!
Hey, I’ve got no beef with windbaggery–that’s why I’m willing to hang out here so often. Ba dim ram! Chaboom siss! It’s boring windbaggery (McLaughlin Report, most of Air America) that sucks.
I don’t think I’ve ever been completely taken with Moore’s films. Even Roger and Me reeked of a kind of smug potshotting (I thought the woman selling rabbits was handled condescendingly). And yet I think he’s a fascinating filmmaker–I really dig a guy making populist arguments from the left, with frequent bursts of outrageously good humor. And he takes “lefty” arguments and pitches ’em far from the academic/intellectual slant of “The Nation”–in a way, trying to reach people not currently in the choir (or pick your non-denominational metaphor).
More than any film I LOVED his television work, particularly “TV Nation.” He did a piece on cabs and racism in NYC that was slight in conception yet wickedly sharp in execution, and its one-(nasty)-joke premise rippled out to a fairly smart critique of the “colorblind” society. He tested whether cabbies really would discriminate against black passengers (not picking ’em up). Now, of course he KNEW that they would–otherwise, not good tv, eh? But the joke is no less smart, the politics no less provocative for being a signalled punch. When he has “renowned actor” Yaphet Kotto stand forlornly on one corner while down the street a (white) ex-con flags down (and then gets) the cab — it’s good. When he puts a fake baby in Kotto’s hands, and a big sign saying something like “Renowned actor Yaphet Kotto” with a huge arrow pointing to Kotto and the cab still slides by to grab the con, it is perfect. Hell, we KNOW it’s theater. It still works, even when we know it’s not really magic, right?
So, flaws expected, I still wouldn’t miss this for the world. Hope to see it this week. And Denby? That bastard should go back to his masturbation addiction, because since he gave it up he seems to preach sermons as often as review. That was mean. I’ll head back to my masturbation addiction as penance.
Hey–the “users online” says we had 67 visitors online today. How the hell did that happen?
michael moore’s dissent squad on the prowl. either that or the yahoo bot.
I haven’t seen ‘Sicko’ yet so I’ll reserve judgment about it until later, though everything I have read suggests that, among Michael Moore movies, this is the one least guilty of condescension, absence of concrete policy alternatives, and pranks. Again, without watching the movie, Denby’s review mostly makes me angry. How dare he suggest that Americans know how bad their healthcare system is without Moore’s help, that serious reform is just around the corner from Democrats, and that the accounts of European healthcare systems are not nuanced enough?
Moore is a political activist, and his documentaries serve his political causes. That has always bothered movie reviewers, and especially the liberal NPR crowd (I’ll never forget Moore tangling with Terry Gross after ‘Roger and Me’). They have some naive notion of objectivity in mind for documentaries in which the facts speaks for themselves, and if we can just place the facts in front of the American people, all will be well. [To some extent, going back to the ‘Reasonable Man’ thread, this is Nader’s failing as well.] Moore understands, firstly, that there is no such thing as politically neutral storytelling, and secondly, that processing “facts†requires that they be placed in a narrative framework. His gift as a film-maker is to use the power of the absurd to help the viewer grasp, not just that something is wrong (the war, healthcare, guns), but that it is an outrage, and that the continued existence of these wrongs is an assault on what it means to be a civilized country. It is the outrage that generates political action and ultimately change, not the simple knowledge of wrong. That is why the pranks often work so well. Like Reynolds, I think he did some of his best work for TV, because he was able to use that absurdism to force the viewer to confront racism or corporate greed or whatever. In one episode I remember him walking around a factory in the Maquiladora and asking the manager how you say is Spanish “help, my arm is trapped in this machine.â€
Just before ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ came out I went to an anti-war meeting in the basement of a local church, mostly the local left, heavily inflected with liberal churches. We started to talk about asking the local movie theater to show the movie and then let us have a public discussion in the theater after the showing. One of the participants objected on the grounds that she didn’t like Moore’s movies (for many of the reasons Denby and others have listed), and instead she waxed lyrical about some documentary in which an expatriate Jewish Pole returns to Poland, confronts his past and the ambivalent relationship of the country to its responsibility for war and genocide. This, she urged, was a better anti-war film than ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ As I listened to her, I remember thinking: this is why we always lose; this is why the left is condemned to irrelevance, because we don’t understand politics, and we’d rather be pure and irrelevant than get a little dirty in order to make the world a better place.
I’m not showering today!
chris, to those who say that nader lost gore the 2000 election, i say moore lost kerry the 2004 one. by the way, fahrenheit 9/11 made a boat-load of money and the democrats still lost.
i don’t disagree with the gist of your post–which is a fine critique of my unease with moore–but i think it is possible to have a little more nuance with the outrage, and a little less smug sanctimony.
austan goolsbee, economics professor and advisor to obama, has a good critique of the film at slate. he likes the diagnosis but not the prescription. worth a read.
finally watched it last night. going over my quotes of various critiques from months ago, i find that i come out on the side of the fans of the film here. i think this is the least condescending, the least windbaggy of moore’s films, and pretty good in its own right. and it succeeds in no small part by keeping moore himself off-camera for a significant amount of time (though there is one completely unnecessary bit at the end designed to emphasize moore’s own saintliness–perhaps left in there as a reminder of the self-indulgence he suppressed for the rest of the film.) this is high-quality rabble-rousing. and yes, the nixon-erlichmann tapes, as well as the bits detailing the insurance bills and washington corruption, and clinton selling out–all of this was shocking to me.
but i want to make a lateral point, not related to the film’s central interests (and not intended as a critique of the film).
it is interesting to put this alongside a film like the death of mr. lazarescu. there’s a scene here that echoes that film, as moore journeys in an on-call ambulance with a doctor making a house-call. the outcome of moore’s journey is far more pleasant. i don’t draw the connection in order to suggest that moore’s vision of socialized medicine is too sanitized (though it doubtless is to some degree)–after all the american economy is surely closer to france’s rather than post-ceaucescu romania’s (well, i hope so anyway)–but instead to point to something glimpsed briefly here that resonated with me in a way that they might not have with most americans. in lazarescu even as the system decays and dies around the central character we still see a strong sense of community. this film suggests that american society has become so atomized that expecting any kind of solidarity or politics or social contract based on a sense of connection outside the self, or immediate family unit, seems naive.
early in the film we meet the elderly couple who’re moving in with their kids in denver. they’ve travelled with all their belongings in 2 cars and arrive at their daughter’s house to find they’ve been given a small basement room which is already full of stuff which is not going to be moved out. later their son shows up talks to them about how expensive it is for he and his siblings to have to go and help their parents pack and move. coming from a culture where taking care of your parents is a natural function like breathing, this was just too shocking to me. not the son’s assholishness, which, to be fair, may have been him trying to make a smart point about hidden costs for the camera’s benefit,) but the miniscule attempt made by the daughter and her family to make comfortable room for her parents. later in the film, moore stops and asks a rhetorical question: “what kind of people have we become?” or something like that (okay, so maybe this is part of the film’s interests). the answer is truly depressing.
I agree with Arnab’s overall view of the movie, having watched it when it finally appreared on DVD. I also showed the middle sections (the comparative analysis of Canada, the UK and France) to my welfare state class. There is no question but that it is a one-sided portrayal, and the assorted problems associated with various forms of universal healthcare are largely ignored. But it is very easy to miss the forest for the trees in this debate, and Moore very effectively makes the case that healthcare ought to be a right, a basic component of citizenship. That is how it is viewed outside of the US, but here we get bogged down in issues of implementation and funding.
Over and over again, Moore finds the simple humanity of his subjects, and of the issue, where most debates (and this included the Democrats) cannot move beyond slogans. That is part of Moore’s craft, and while it may not mirror some Jim Lehrer Newshour debate that presents a “balanced” offering of a lunatic from the Heritage Foundation and a diffident liberal, it captures something missing from our policy debate.
One more thing, that probably oversteps the boundaries of appropriate blog content, yet is relevant to how I respond to Moore’s documentary. Over this last holiday break, I spent a week in Florida, with my immediate family and my parents, who had flown over from England. My father had a heart attack. He ended up being OK, and eventually received very fine care.
But the entire experience was colored by the issue of money. He had English travel insurance and the Florida hospital wanted nothing to do with that. So, while he lay in the cardiac ICU, I spent literally hours in the hospital business office trying to get the travel insurance and the hospital to reach some arrangement that would let us leave without some crippling payment. At one point, the business manager waylaid my mother outside my father’s room and told her he was effectively uninsured and we would have to put up any assets we had as surety.
It got sorted out, but my father made life-threatening decisions based on the issue of money. I had to over-rule him on going to the hospital in the first place and then on staying overnight (tests the next morning showed that his coronary artery was blocked) because he was worried about it being covered by the insurance.
What Moore very astutely does is focus not on the uninsured — that’s easy — but on the insured (people, let’s face it, more like us), and demonstrate that the system is still totally fucked. There is a time for careful, dispassionate, balanced analysis, and there is a time for outrage. Moore gives us the latter, leavened with humor, and that fills a real gap in our political culture. I’d rather have Tony Benn explain that healthcare is a citizenship right on camera, than have Obama and Clinton and Edwards duel over employer mandates any day.
Chris, glad to hear that your father is well.
My reaction to the film was also very personal. I have an uncle who is developmentally disabled, who is just ‘able’ enough to not qualify for social support services and yet well outside the range of able to really care for himself. He’s now fifty and change, and his whole life he kind of teetered at the edge of bankruptcy and real ruin–and he’s now unemployed (for the last couple years), and gets by, barely. I could go on–an aunt, my grandmother, my own son (who because of a minor, minor heart condition cannot be insured in a new policy, so if we ever lose or leave our policy, he may very well be lost; meanwhile, we’re stuck with whatever exorbitant rates our own coverage costs). Most of my family is not uninsured, and most would qualify somewhere in that broad class range above the poverty level. (And I’m now well out of it, no matter how much I moan.) We could probably all go on.
Moore’s film, unlike all of his others, engendered in me not just a philosophical or political outrage but a slew of stories of my own. That seemed to me to be a genius of this film — his populism was really grounded in people’s lives, in a way that seemed far more candid, genuine than his other films. And it hit me in a way none of his other films have.
I also think Arnab’s point about the social network, and the contrast with Lazarescu, is excellent. I’d recommend that film again, as a companion to this one (as well as an excellent film in its own right).