SICKO
Rating: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Michael Moore (who else?)
Director: Michael Moore
On DVD from Alliance.

When it was released in June, Sicko grossed $24 million at the domestic box office. Strong business for a documentary, but not so much for a Michael Moore film – Fahrenheit 9/11 made $119 million in 2004. An obvious reason for the relatively disappointing box office is that Fahrenheit was one of the most controversial and talked-about movies of our time, while Sicko, with its less polarizing subject matter, was not, making it vulnerable to the louder marketing campaigns of the various Transformers, Spider-Men, and Pirates playing at the same multiplex. But I think one of the most crucial reasons for Sicko’s weak box office was the Weinstein Company’s surprisingly sedate marketing campaign. Much of the pre-release hype surrounding the movie was careful to point out that it was Moore’s least divisive film to date. It felt at times like the Weinsteins were saying, “At last! The Michael Moore film that conservatives can enjoy!” The problem: selling a kinder and gentler Michael Moore to conservatives is like selling them edible shit. It’s edible, but it’s still shit.

It’s too bad that Sicko didn’t do more business, though, because being Moore’s least divisive film, it is, if not his best, perhaps his most valuable work to date. There are fewer cheap laughs here, and while there’s definitely the emotional moments, they’re not as syrupy and manipulative as in, say, Fahrenheit 9/11. This is an entertaining film with a deep undercurrent of sorrow, and if I were American, it would make me want to work for change. All things considered, a very successful film.

Sicko has a very even three-act structure. Moore doesn’t appear in act one, instead focusing his attention on lower-middle-class Americans whose HMOs denied them health insurance for a variety of startling reasons. One woman, for example, was denied insurance because in her distant past she had a yeast infection that she failed to warn the insurance company about. Moore then broadens his focus to include previous failed attempts to institute the dreaded ‘socialized’ medicine in the United States, and points to a disturbing statistic abut the proportional inequality of congressmen to healthcare lobbyists.

The middle section of the film, where Moore travels to countries that have adopted universal healthcare – England, France, Canada – is the most problematic. This section is generally persuasive, but as is so often the case with his films, Moore deals here with a lot of half-truths (more than one Canadian critic pointed out Moore’s rose-tinted view of Canadian hospital wait times), and, frankly, goes on far too long. Ten or fifteen minutes snipped would have dramatically improved the movie’s pacing. My candidate is a scene where Moore learns that the French government will send over nannies to help out new mothers with household chores. It’s funny, but irrelevant.

Things liven up in the last section, with Moore’s notorious trip to Guantanamo Bay (the only place on American soil with free healthcare) and Cuba. It’s grandstanding, yes, but it’s Moore’s best grandstanding to date. It would be nice to get on my high horse and condemn these sorts of stunts, but condemning a Michael Moore film for having gimmicky stunts is like condemning a porno movie for having sex scenes in it. You get what you pay for. Incidentally, you may have heard reports that Moore appears in Sicko less frequently than his other films. Untrue – he may not appear until forty minutes in, but he dominates the rest of the movie, and his sardonic narration is non-stop.

A lot of critics have complained about Moore’s appearances in this film, saying that a multi-millionaire with a Palm d’Or and an Oscar on his shelf can’t convincingly act like a naïve hick and say, “Gee whiz, you mean you Canadians get healthcare for free?” I think this misses the point. Moore isn’t stupid – he knows he can’t pass for a rube, and I think this is part of the joke. But anyway, even if it isn’t, Moore’s onscreen character has become the documentary genre’s closest thing to a Chaplinesque figure, and in a movie about a topic so sorrowful, it’s kinda nice to have him around.