Sicko

I find Michael Moore pretty irritating. Whilst I agree that American gun laws are insane and the Bush administration is corrupt and incompetent Moore's documentaries have always seemed to me resort to misrepresentation and exaggeration to make their point. There are bits in Fahrenheit 9/11 where he shows footage of members of the Bush administration shaking hands with people in Arab dress and it's clear that the images are out of context and that the intent is to play to base xenophobic instincts in the audience. The use of emotive music is another problem for me. But I guess I'm just old fashioned expecting documentary film making to aspire to the same standard of impartiality as the news media is (quite rightly) expected to. Moore is a skilled film maker and polemicist, his documentaries have a cinematic quality which his followers, even the excellent Smartest Guys in the Room, have failed to match.

Sicko displays many of its predecessors problems; the smug voice over, the irritating sarcasm, over emotional music and de-contextualised footage are all present. Thing is, whereas with Farenheit 9/11 you get the impression that he's taking a complex set of issues and reducing them to a cartoon, in Sicko the issue at stake is cartoonishly simple: How can the richest country in the world have no social security system? And: Can such a rich country that fails to provide even basic medical provision for all its citizens be considered civilized?

Much of the film is taken up with touring the health care systems of other nations, Canada, the UK, France and Cuba. This was where I was expecting the film to fall apart, but to be honest the portrait of the NHS may be somewhat cursory and rose tinted but I certainly wouldn't describe it as inaccurate. Moore cherry picks the best bits from each country's systems to make his point: "Socialised" medicine is one of the most important achievements of the 20th century. In this case his methods seem to me to be justified. Whilst the NHS isn't perfect, you know that the country would take to the streets if any government tried to dismantle it. And frankly the American people should take to the streets and demand that their government provide them all with health care too. If enough of them see this film then I really think that they might.



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