(2007)4Perry SeibertThere's an old saying among lawyers that, during a trial, you never ask the witness a question you don't already know the answer to. Michael Moore follows this adage throughout his alternately entertaining and disturbing documentary Sicko, as he interviews doctors from countries with nationalized healthcare, asking each one how much patients pay and then feigning surprise each time the physician gives the same oh-so-shocking response (that response, of course, being "nothing").
However, when detailing a handful of horror stories people share about the deaths of loved ones caught in the profit-driven, red-tape filled bureaucracy of HMOs, Moore never feigns his anger. The twist being that Moore expresses that anger not in his physical appearance or his voice, but in the way he wields his edits like a sledgehammer, using every element in a director's bag of tricks to make the audience feel the loss, pain, and outrage he and his subjects feel at the failure of the health care system. In detailing how insurance companies, drug companies, and the government created the health care system that exists in America at the beginning of the 21st century, Moore manages to skewer Nixon, Reagan, and Hillary Clinton, while also providing an enlightening interview with a British politician, Tony Benn, who discusses how socialized medicine came to be in the U.K., as well as the importance of democracy. This interview goes to the heart of Sicko's message because democracy and power are the larger concepts Moore wants his audience to think about after they view the film.
From the beginning of his directorial career, Moore has always been a masterful agitprop filmmaker. He gets under the skin of both his supporters and his detractors because he understands how to appeal to emotions, and although he doesn't always know how to fix the problems he addresses in his films, there's never doubt that those problems are serious and need to be addressed. At his best (and Sicko is among his best), Moore places his subject in the right context, in order to illustrate what these issues say about America on a larger scale. Moore directs these grand questions toward his audience, even though most of the time, his answers to the questions are clear.
After exploring the predominance of violence in American culture in Bowling for Columbine and taking a critical look at the September 11th attacks in Fahrenheit 9/11, activist filmmaker Michael Moore turns his attentions toward the topic of health care in the United States in this documentary that weighs the plight of the uninsured (and the insured who must deal with abuse from insurance companies) against the record-breaking profits of the pharmaceutical industry. Moore interviews a number of people who have been left broke by medical bills even though they were fully insured, and explains how the corporate drive for profits has left numerous people in financial and medical disarray. After hearing that detainees in Guantanamo have access to free health care, Moore assembles a group of World Trade Center rescue workers to travel to Cuba in order to get the medical help they need for ailments they incurred in 2001. Moore's film debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
