“Sicko” Could Have Used an Editor

by Paul Hogarth, 2007-07-06

I love Michael Moore. He’s incredibly sharp, clever, and funny in his biting critique of American politics, culture and society. He’s one of these rare commentators who can make you laugh and think at the same time, and progressives are very lucky to have him on their side. I’ve seen all of his movies at least once, have heard him speak twice, and own all three of his books. But when I saw his latest film – “Sicko,” a documentary about the private health insurance industry – on opening night, I have to say that I was disappointed. Simply put, “Sicko” doesn’t hold a candle to Moore’s prior movies, which is sad because I know that he is capable of doing a lot better.

The film is long for a documentary, but it feels even longer because it’s not jam-packed with jarring facts and figures – as well as Moore-like antics – that made “Fahrenheit 9/11” so effective. While it’s a powerful indictment of our health care system with true horror stories of how the insurance industry has literally killed American patients, the film is way too anecdotal when it compares other countries that have national health insurance, leaving the skeptical viewer to wonder whether his examples are accurate.

Unlike “Roger & Me” or “Fahrenheit 9/11,” I can’t say that I walked out of the theatre having learned anything new. If you don’t share Moore’s politics like I do, I doubt that you will be persuaded. Moore describes a serious problem and provides the right solution, but he should have used fewer anecdotes and more expert opinions to make it the type of high-quality film documentaries that he has done in the past.

Moore’s first films – “Roger & Me” (1989), “Canadian Bacon” (1995) and “The Big One” (1997) – were all 90 minutes long and highly entertaining. While “Canadian Bacon” was fiction, the others were biting documentaries that portrayed the grim reality of working-class Americans in the global economy, and created the Michael Moore genre that he is famous for. I wasn’t crazy about “Bowling for Columbine” (2002) because it was longer – two hours – and it meandered on tangents without a clear point, but Moore improved his style with “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004), a scathing review of the Bush Administration that in my opinion was the best movie of his career.

When I walked out of “Sicko,” I felt that Moore made the same mistake that he had made with “Columbine.” The movie was too long to be a documentary, and maybe his style just simply doesn’t work with the two-hour format. But I learned to my surprise that “Fahrenheit” was ten minutes longer than “Sicko,” and yet he managed to sustain my interest throughout the length of that film.

The difference was in the delivery. Moore is capable at providing informative substance, interspersed with hilarious guerrilla theatre and a wacky sense of humor that exposes right-wing, corporate talking-points as absurd. In a film about the health care industry, Moore could have done that, but he fell short.

“Sicko” starts off well. Moore had solicited health care horror stories from his website, and the first 30 minutes include heart-breaking stories about Americans stuck paying astronomical bills because their insurance refused to cover it – the car crash victim whose ambulance ride was not “pre-approved,” or the woman whose husband died because a potential life-saving bone marrow transplant was “experimental.”

He explains how private insurance companies are driven by profit, which leads to dumping vulnerable patients who are “too expensive” to be provided care for. Rather than being rewarded for helping people, doctors are rewarded for denying treatment.

Some of the more effective parts in the beginning include recordings of President Nixon developing his H.M.O. proposal, and Ronald Reagan ominously warning about the evils of “socialized medicine.” And in a manner that only Michael Moore can pull off, he describes how Hillary Clinton came to Washington determined to get health care reform, only to face despicable attacks by right-wing politicians. Today, he describes, Clinton has sold out to the point that she receives more money from insurance companies than any other U.S. Senator.

But in an effort to drive his point home, Moore overwhelms the viewer with so many anecdotes that the individual stories lose their effectiveness and the film becomes repetitive. It gets worse when he attempts to compare America’s health care system with three countries – Canada, Great Britain and France – that have a single-payer, national health care system. Moore visits each of these countries, and provides an uncritical view of how wonderful their health care system is based upon visits to the hospital and the lifestyles of individual French, British and Canadian citizens.

Moore loses credibility by devoting such a huge chunk of the film on these three countries without ever once interviewing an expert on their health care system. Even if you already agree with Moore, it would have been informative to get a few experts to explain how the system in these countries work. Instead, he just raves about how fabulous things are. Frankly, it was embarrassing to see him explore the homes of Europeans to prove that people in socialist democracies don’t sacrifice a good lifestyle, without ever explaining whether such households are representative.

In a round-about way, the most insightful part of this segment is when American expatriates living in France tell him the difference between their home country and their adopted country: in the United States, people are afraid of their government. In France, the government is afraid of the people. Moore had explored this theory before in “Bowling for Columbine” – Americans are crippled by fear – but it would have been far more effective to weave that issue into the whole film, rather than just casually mention it in 30 seconds.

The film gets better when Moore takes a boatload of American patients to Guantanamo Bay, where al-Qaeda terrorists receive top-notch medical treatment. When they can’t get into the Naval Base, he takes them to Havana where they get treated for free in a government hospital. Moore points out that with national health care, Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States, but he’s wrong when he says that Cuba also has a higher life expectancy. Nonetheless, it’s a powerful part of the movie, which led me to wonder – why did he put us through over an hour of visiting Canada, Britain and France?

Michael Moore should have gone back to the drawing board to make a more effective documentary about our health care system. Getting anecdotes about private health insurance companies denying treatment is great, but don’t overwhelm the viewer. If you’re going to explore the national health care system in other countries, get a few experts in there to talk about the system and honestly assess its critics. Don’t just visit a family’s house in Paris and expect that you’ve “done your homework,” because relying exclusively on anecdotes makes people who don’t share your politics skeptical.

And go back to your 90-minute documentaries. They were so much more effective.

Send feedback to paul@beyondchron.org