SiCKO by Paul Bullock

The revolution came and went but the world stayed the same. For all its Cannes success and celebrity backing, history has proven Fahrenheit 911 a failure. Bush is still in office, the Republican party are gearing up for another potentially-successful assault on the White House and war still rages in the Middle East. What’s more, the film and the publicity that was created in its wake left creator Michael Moore reeling. The neo-cons hate him, cinema critics have called him an egotist and even his fellow liberals have turned on him, with Canadian filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk making Manufacturing Dissent, a film which accused him of telling just as many porkys as Bush and his cronies do.

Moore himself, of course, has been keen to dismiss such talk, but the critics were right. Somewhere between the underground hit of Bowling for Columbine and commercial success of Fahrenheit, the portly auteur lost his way. Away went the calm, intelligent wit that made his earlier films such entertaining and informative works, replaced by an obnoxious sense of arrogance. Opinions were forced onto the audience, rather than coolly explained to them, and the facts, instead of being well-researched and carefully reasoned, were warped to fit a blinkered sense of dogmatism that made the filmmaker seem just as bad as the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, rather than the liberal, left-wing antidote to their inane ramblings.

SiCKO doesn’t completely do away with this. Turning his attention to America’s beleaguered health system and the corporate corruption at the heart of it, Moore is happy to develop the case for the prosecution, but not that of the defence. While he travels to Canada, Britain and France to present idealised portraits of their health systems (the NHS is shown in a particularly fairy-tale light), he attributes America’s refusal to accept free, universal healthcare to nothing more than his usual bugbears: big business evil, here represented by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, and a good-old fashioned fear that socialised medicine will be the first step on a long and dusty track to Communism.

He also maintains his cavalier attitude to simple facts and figures. Perhaps stung by the criticisms of Melnyk and Caine, Moore loads (and probably overburdens) his film with stats, but still can‘t present them in a normal, comprehendible way. In one scene, he shows the list of ailments that aren’t covered by medical insurance. It’s certainly a long list and those with sharp eyes will notice doozies like Alzheimer’s, dementia and cancer. But by presenting them like the opening crawl from a Star Wars film, he refuses his audience the chance to get to grips with and contextualise them, instead simply spoon-feeding us and demanding we view them only as VERY BAD THINGS.

Luckily he has an ace up his sleeve. SiCKO is Moore’s most compassionate film to date because rather than concentrating solely on the cold, corrupt heart of politics, he turns his attentions to the normal, everyday people who are affected by the politics. One man we are introduced to accidentally chopped off the tips of two fingers with a power saw and was told he’d have to pay a combined $70,000 to get them put back on (he ultimately opted to have just one re-attached). Another is seen applying his own stitches to a deep gash on his knee because he can’t afford to pay a doctor to do it. And, most heartbreakingly, a woman is caught on CCTV looking dazed and confused after being left on the side of the road by the very people who are supposed to be taking care of her.

It’s the final act that will resonate most with American audiences though. For his big finale, Moore takes volunteer 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba in a bid to get them the medical attention they have to pay for in the US. On paper, it’s a typically overblown Moore stunt, up their with his ambush on Charlton Heston for pointlessness. But this is no act of juvenile dissent. Cuba, thanks to the Missiles Crisis and over fifty years of Communist rule, is a deeply felt and long-lasting enemy in the eyes of the US public. By taking American heroes there, Moore doesn’t intend just to stir up a hornets nest, but to make an eloquent point: people are dying needlessly, he argues, and something needs to be done, even if it does mean sacrificing some political beliefs (he even manages to do a similar thing on a personal level with one of his fiercest critics).

It’s a sentiment that evolves his own dogmatic filmmaking and also drags the documentary form itself out of the partisan drudgery it has found itself stuck in of late. Hopefully America will take note and this time the revolution will be a success.