Week of June 27, 2007, Issue #610
FILM
Michael Moore shows us an America that is Sicko of it all
BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
‘Too many OBGYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women across the country.” This remarkably un-funny, misogynist joke comes from the mouth of George W Bush. And so Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Sicko, begins.
Another dissection of Dubya, hot on the heels of Fahrenheit 9/11? More confrontations with CEOs? Most critics of Moore made up their minds long ago about his supposed slanting of truth, sarcastic narrative and manufactured persona. But since 1989, Moore’s been working in that non-American tradition of cinema vérite, where the filmmaker can be up front, since the camera and editing already bias the story being filmed.
In Sicko, Moore’s voiceover offers some of that caustic sarcasm (influenced, perhaps, by the late Kurt Vonnegut, honoured in the credits). Moore also plays the naïve American shuffling around in his ballcap and a leather jacket as he tries to figure out what’s gone wrong. But neither pose becomes wearisome because Moore mostly lets the sufferers speak, their stories revealing the deep, oozing wounds of a broken healthcare system. There are no confrontations here; Bush is not attacked much more than would-be reformer Hillary Clinton, who eventually jumped into the pockets of Big Pharma and other “healthcare” lobbyists.
This film, probably Moore’s most electrically charged since his first, Roger and Me, is driven by a deep, sobering indignation. Sicko takes the pulse of America and finds it flatlining when it comes to a basic human right—the richest country on earth cannot even afford to give its sickest citizens a dose of basic dignity.
The stories are chilling and damning in what they reveal of profit-driven HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) denying or revoking coverage, politicians whose apathy has been bought off, and, in the final diagnosis, a psycho system where the homeless sick are taken by HMO thugs and dumped like trash at the curb outside a county facility. One of them can be seen on a clinic’s street camera, wandering dazed and confused on the sidewalk. But she is not nearly as lost as the system itself.
Moore’s stroke of ingenuity is to point out those nearly 50 million uninsured Americans—Adam, stitching up his own infected knee with thread at home—and then focus, instead, on “you,” an American in that vast, insured majority. Eighteen million uninsured Americans will die each year, but surely the insured are safer? Only if they are lucky.
Larry and Donna Smith, after so many heart and cancer treatments, exhausted their HMO insurance and had to sell their home, moving into a daughter’s cramped storage room. Frank still works at 79 to pay for the drugs he and his elderly wife need; the HMO Cigna only covers both cochlear implants for a slowly deafening nine-month-old girl when her father suggests Moore will get involved. The most awful story comes from a Kansas City woman, devastated by the death of her husband after their HMO hospital’s board of trustees refused him a bone-marrow transplant (from his younger brother, a perfect match) because it was costly “experimental treatment.”
Sicko simmers into a boil of grief, anger and shame over the corrupt, privatized HMO system set up by Nixon in 1971, but then loses some steam in the middle section, when Moore tours Canada’s, England’s, France’s (and later Cuba’s) patently superior, patient-first systems. Moore basically plasters over the smaller problems with these systems (here in mega-rich Alberta, we must pay healthcare “premiums” every month; the French whom Moore interviews are all affluent whites) and the film is more chillingly persuasive when Moore turns his stethoscope onto the cold body of the US system.
The final section, where Moore takes 9/11 volunteers wracked with respiratory and other health problems to Guantanamo (the only American place with top-notch care for all residents), is masterfully affecting. Led by Old Labour politician Tony Benn, Moore suggests that early debt and the twin toxic myths of choice and individual power have stripped Americans of a belief in the collective will, the desire to get on the streets and demand change. Yet the stories and images in Sicko still deliver an adrenal shot, a strangely enervating mix of anger, shame and hope that, with the diagnosis so obvious, the fight for a cure will begin. V
Opens Fri, Jun 29
SICKO
Written & Directed by Michael Moore
Starring a few of the sick and the poor yearning to break free of the american health care system