"Sicko"

In his most persuasive film yet, Michael Moore gives the U.S. healthcare system a full exam -- and offers up a grim prognosis.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Michael Moore, Movies, Health, Health Care, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Photo: Dog Eat Dog Films

Michael Moore in "Sicko."

June 22, 2007 | There's no other way to come at Michael Moore's "Sicko" than to state upfront that his essential argument -- that it's shameful that America, the richest country in the world, fails to provide healthcare for all its citizens -- is irrefutable. No matter how you feel about Moore or his filmmaking tactics, there's little here that any sane, reasonable human could argue with: We've fashioned a system in which big corporations get rich off our illnesses, or even just off the regular preventive steps that most of us take to avoid getting sick. (How many of us have gone to get a routine colonoscopy or pap smear, allegedly "covered" by insurance and designed to detect potentially life-threatening problems early on, only to be hit with several hundred dollars' worth of co-payments and lab fees? On top of whatever premiums we pay to begin with? And that's just the small stuff.) In our system (even calling it a system seems to be granting it too much respect) the poor aren't provided for, and even those in the middle class -- as Moore shows, in a series of bone-rattling anecdotes that may rob your sleep -- can literally lose the roof above their heads or, worse yet, their lives, simply because they either can't afford or are denied healthcare. And that's people who are actually insured.

"Sicko" is a blunt, effective picture, and there's no doubt that Moore feels passionately about this subject, even discounting his own considerably bloated need to be the center of attention. A sentence like that is almost always followed by a "but," and here it comes: It's perfectly valid to agree with Moore's thesis and still have problems with his filmmaking, his choices of what to put where, his way of eliding certain realities lest they weaken his (already considerably strong) case. And while "Sicko" is, in my view, the most persuasive and least aggravating of all of Moore's movies, it still bears many of the frustrating Moore earmarks -- most notably, a deliberately simplistic desire to render everything in black-and-white terms, as if he didn't trust his audience enough to follow him into some of the far more complex gray areas.

As Moore explains in the film, when he undertook this project, he solicited e-mail from people who'd had bad experiences with healthcare or insurance. Overwhelmed by the response, he took his camera around the country -- and into Canada, Great Britain, France and even Cuba -- to commit people's stories to tape. The Americans' stories range from simply depressing to utterly heartbreaking: A 60ish couple, both of them former professionals with good jobs, lose everything when the two of them incur serious healthcare costs; they're forced to move into a small storage room in their daughter's basement. A young mother in Southern California tells how her baby died: The infant was seriously ill, and her treatment was delayed as she was turned away from one hospital and shuttled to another. Moore, to his credit, plays her grief straight, realizing he doesn't need any additional "Adagio for Strings" pathos to intensify this story.

Unfortunately, he reserves Samuel Barber's overused weeper for another scene, featuring footage from 1996 government hearings into managed healthcare standards in which a doctor formerly employed by Humana testified that (among other horrors) physicians in the system were actually given bonuses for denying healthcare. The sequence would have been powerful enough by itself, but Moore just can't resist cranking up the poignant music. Nor can he resist tucking in, here and there, his trademark found film footage, often run at high speeds -- you know, comic clips of doctors sawing off limbs and the like -- accompanied by silly cartoon music: If only Moore could recognize that his showboating doesn't enhance his message; it only gets in the way. Toward the end of "Sicko," Moore tells us that the fellow who runs the most successful anti-Michael Moore Web site nearly lost everything when his wife became seriously ill and he found himself overwhelmed by medical bills. Anonymously, Moore sent him a check for $12,000. Good for Moore (and for that couple who needed it). But by choosing to include the story, Moore slyly gets to be both the anonymous good Samaritan and tell us about his -- you should pardon the expression -- largesse.

Next page: Letting the facts and figures speak for themselves