Roll up. Roll up. Ringmaster, rhetorician and raker of muck, it is not for nothing that the latest Michael Moore documentary is now an event to rival a new Batman movie. Sicko, a righteous rant against America’s scandalous resistance to the notion of socialised medicine sees the rowdy filmmaker in fine fettle, a condition that brings out the very best and worst in him.
Gimmicky and lopsided and pregnant with those flaws that political entertainers of a different stripe love to harp on, Sicko could not be accused of even-handedness. Oh well. Even Fred Wiseman, with his studious methodology can’t eliminate the natural bias of the documentarian. And with Mr. Moore, the endearingly strident agenda is essential to his global appeal.
Certainly, his stunts can inspire groaning from the gallery. When he reveals himself as the guardian angel who anonymously bailed out the avatar behind a leading Moore-bashing website one can’t help but think of McClintic Sphere’s dictate that one should “help without publicising your ass”.
No matter. Sicko, his least divisive and most focussed film to date, is, for the most part a no-brainer. Travelling with a caravan of 9/11 rescue workers whose medical plans would not extend to covering the health problems caused by that fateful day, Mr. Moore visits England, Canada, France, Guantanamo Bay and, wouldn’t you know it, Cuba. There, Che Guevara’s granddaughter sensibly informs us that universal health care is a basic human right while Moore’s sickly companions are treated (for free) in a swish hospital that might easily be mistaken for the Louvre.
For all his argumentative aerobatics and chicanery in the editing suite (the use of Stalinist anthem ‘March Of The Kuban’ on the soundtrack is just downright naughty) Michigan’s most celebrated son puts forward a case that’s difficult to fault. The USA is, after all, the only industrialised country in the world that’s prepared to dump necessitous patients out on the street. We hear testimony from a 75 year-old working two jobs to pay for his outrageously priced prescriptions. One doctor confesses that as the medical director of a health insurance company (or HMO), she has purposely withheld potentially lifesaving treatments.
How can this have come to pass? Well, we hear a Richard Nixon recording on which he makes approving noises for less medical cover and more medical profit. And just to reinforce the idea of a system that only works for the elite who maintain it, we learn that Hilary Clinton, who once vowed to reform America’s gangrenous health system, is now on the HMO payroll.
Does this all amount to entertainment? Damned straight. Is it agitprop? Of course it is. Might he, or anyone else, have found a decent argument for private health care? As if…