Sicko

(Roadshow Films)

Run Time: 118 mins
Rating: PG, Documentary
Starring: Michael Moore
Directed by: Michael Moore

At first glance, Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko doesn’t seem as confrontational or controversial as his previous movies, particularly Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 911, which looked at America’s gun culture and the Bush administration’s bungling of the war in Iraq respectively.

After a short while, it’s clear that it isn’t. If anything, it’s more so. Because Sicko hits upon a hot-button topic that is saddening, baffling and infuriating – the seeming inability of one of the world’s most powerful and prosperous countries to provide adequate health care for its citizens.

Of course, even viewers aligned with Moore’s worldview know that his depiction of events should be taken with a grain of salt. But any documentary should be seen as a starting point for further investigation, and one can only hope Sicko will prompt its audience to look deeper into the issues of private and public medical care.

That said, even if Moore is stacking the deck against the health-care industry and the politicians it has apparently purchased with campaign donations and the like, it’s hard for anyone with a functioning heart to not be moved by the story of a husband and father denied a potentially life-saving cancer treatment by his insurance company.

Or the middle-class couple left homeless and bankrupt by mounting medical costs. Or the September 11 rescue workers whose physical and psychological ailments are ignored by the government. Or the woman booted from a hospital and dumped at a skid-row shelter after she couldn’t pay her medical bills.

In Sicko, Moore claims to have received emails about thousands of such horror stories from people who’ve tangled with the US health-care system – even people with private health insurance aren’t immune from shabby treatment by profit-obsessed companies – but it’s clear that he views this situation as symptomatic of a greater malaise.

It’s something Moore has investigated in all of his documentaries – a gradual erosion of compassion and understanding, not only between those who wield power and influence and those who have little but between us all.

When a dazed, disoriented woman walks down the street in a hospital gown and people fail to do anything to help, there’s something wrong with the society we’ve formed, Moore is saying.

Naturally, two hours of such material could prove downright miserable. And Moore, canny showman that he is, provides such much-needed contrast (and levity) by travelling overseas to the UK, where the state-run health system allows for both affordable care and well-paid doctors, and France, where the government provides health benefits that leave Moore gobsmacked.

And in a moving final act, the filmmaker takes a handful of Sicko’s subjects to Cuba, where the tiny nation’s public health-care system is able to provide the relief America was unwilling or unable to offer.

Even if Sicko does involve a degree of showboating and sleight of hand by Moore, its intentions are pure and transparent. It presents the worst aspects of a faulty system, it presents the best examples of possible alternatives and it asks us all to work towards a solution. Sicko may not be a cure, but it’s a hell of a diagnosis.

Rated: 4/5 stars

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