Sicko (2007)

I found Sicko to be a very uneven film. For the most part, I thought it was simplistic and underwhelming, but there was an aspect of the movie that was also quite subtle and compelling.

By lionizing the socialized health care systems in Canada, France and the UK, Michael Moore didn't really paint a convincing, real world picture of the alternatives to the US model. My own personal experiences with the NHS in England match up pretty closely with how it is portrayed in the movie, and I agree with Moore's opinion that the UK system far surpasses that of the US, but I also know that the NHS is not without fault. Showing some of the downsides of his examples of socialized medicine would not have diminished Moore's argument. On the contrary, it would have made the argument richer and more convincing, and would have better informed audiences about the real issues of the debate. Instead, Moore goes more for the gut, with an approach that favors an emotional punch. I think this is both his weakness and his strength.

It's his weakness because it makes it easy for the right to dismiss him and focus solely on his biases (even though he has no obligation to be fair and balanced). It makes him an easy target, where a strike against Michael Moore is also a strike against socialized medicine. I think it's also his strength, however, because he's doing what the mainstream news media in the US does – that is, taking complicated political situations and turning them into simple emotional ones – but he's redirecting this strategy towards conclusions that are much more progressive than you would ever see in the mainstream media. In other words, while Sicko comes across as an emotionally charged catalogue of HMO horror stories that are designed to get your blood boiling, it ultimately wants you to consider a larger and more complicated set of issues about the role of a social democracy in the United States.

Moore did a similar trick with Bowling for Columbine, which used a sprawling look at American gun culture as a way into its main theme: how the US population is controlled and manipulated through the installation of fear. If Marilyn Manson was the unlikely mouthpiece for Moore's theme in Bowling for Columbine, in Sicko it is British MP Tony Benn. Benn's discussion of the ways in which democracies use the mechanisms of power to diminish solidarity among the people is the core of the movie, and all of Moore's stunts and emotional manipulations in Sicko are working toward making us experience that feeling of solidarity. The feeling of solidarity and of duty towards the rest of society is something that is deeply embedded in the British character: as Benn notes in the movie, there would have been a revolution if Tony Blair had tried to abolish the NHS. Moore is arguing that the same feelings of duty and solidarity are intrinsic to Americans too. The difference is that the US government wields its power over the mechanisms of democracy in a very different and much more sinister way.