Moore's Sicko
by Dean Carrico
by Ryan Senaga
Health care in America is abysmal,
insurance companies would rather let you die instead of paying for your
care, and those in some other countries fare much better than you could
ever hope for.
Those are the central themes surrounding Moore's new documentary, Sicko.
For anybody who's been afflicted with anything more than a cough or
a hangover, the common answer should be a resounding, unenthusiastic,
sarcastic, "No shit."
Moore, like him or loathe him, is one of the more important of the incessant
name-brand social commentators-simply because he is willing to introduce
an uncomfortable subject to a mass audience: the misdeeds of corporate
monopolies (The Big One), gun control (Bowling for Columbine) the disastrous,
and possibly criminal, missteps of our current administration (Fahrenheit
9/11).... Critics poke well-deserved holes in his arguments, but he
graphically points out that the current U. S. health care system, in
a word, sucks.
In past films Moore has often used selective editing, sometimes to the
point where former supporters in interviews disavow his rhetoric. Sicko,
his fifth full-length film, shows a kinder, gentler Moore who is less
willing to ambush clueless receptionists and who keeps himself out of
the picture for the first 45 minutes.
It's an effective tactic. It's nearly impossible to suppress a reaction
while watching example after example of the suffering caused to Americans
unfairly denied care to which they were not only entitled, but also
for which they'd paid. Moore compiles repeated shots of those who have
died, or children who lived only after those involved fought and won
against the bureaucracy.
The first half works so well because it outlines what we-even as a self-centered,
apathetic society, must know-that those in the U.S. without health care
better pray nothing happens to them that chicken soup can't fix, and
those with coverage must hope their health problems don't get serious
enough that their insurance provider will try to find a way out.
But Moore can't resist staying out of his own movie for long. He travels
to Canada and Great Britain to show happy citizens covered by socialized
medicine. He visits countries that Americans are supposed to distrust-France
and Cuba-showing them in their healthy and well-cared-for glow.
Here Moore's selective editing becomes most apparent and appalling.
If Sicko is to be taken at face value, citizens under socialized medicine
have nothing but good things to say about their system. Anybody who
has spent longer than two weeks in any of these countries could probably
cite instances to the contrary-without even mentioning England's dental
history.
Moore has learned to back off the grandstanding of prior films. But
when he listens in slack-jawed wonderment as ordinary citizens disclose
stories of free treatment and cheap medicine, his feigned surprise and
indignation comes off as disingenuous at best and condescending at worst.It's
obvious he didn't pick these locations at random.
Nevertheless, Sicko is an interesting, passionate and even important
film. If it ultimately fails to resonate with American audiences, it
will only be because two decades of Moore's polemic moralizing has rendered
us immune.
Sicko
Palace Theatre, Hilo
934-7777
8/17 (F), 8/18 (Sa), 8/20 (M), 8/21 (T)
8/24 (F), 8/25 (Sa), 8/27 (M), 8/28 (T) @ 7:30 pm
8/19 (Su), 8/26 (Su) @ 2:30 pm
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