Star Review
With all the leftier-than-thou sneering going on these days, we Michael Moore fans have had to go on the defensive. Fortunately, Sicko does a lot of the work for us. The documentarist’s most conciliatory film to date, it addresses an issue that affects left and right, rich and poor alike: what happens to us when we get ill?
Tackling the iniquities of the American health industry (note: industry, not service), Sicko divides into two halves. The first hour presents a series of case studies - composed in a style familiar from Moore’s TV work - featuring people deprived of often crucial medical treatment by insurance companies keen to wriggle out of paying for it. Or, alternatively, the relatives of those no longer alive to share their experiences.
It could have made for a thoroughly bleak experience, but Sicko also serves a second duty as a paean to being and staying active, in all senses. Moore’s anger is energising, and his framing of material, as always, is consistently funny: presenting the American right’s reaction to the very idea of socialised medicine in the form of a bad B-movie, and going on a night-time dash with the médecins of Paris as though he were in a gritty French policier.
Nobody else is making films this political and this accessible, which
should be interpreted as more strength than weakness. Moore’s segment in Britain is enough to make one newly proud of (at least the idea of) the NHS, and it’s clear the director loves the French not just for their healthcare system, but for their willingness to take to the streets if that system isn’t working: the human body and the body politic working in unison.
The contrast with the situation in America – where patients suture their own wounds, and 74-year-olds are forced to work supermarket dumpster jobs to pay for their medication – couldn’t be more shocking. Anti-capitalists often yelp and holler that corporations are killing the world, rhetoric which would ordinarily seem like colourful exaggeration, but Moore’s film very powerfully, and very poignantly, suggests that this may no longer be so.
Mike McCahill on 24th December 2007
View all 124 of Mike McCahill’s reviews
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Film Description
The latest broadside from the incendiary documentary filmmaker has the USA's private healthcare system in its sights, showing how even Americans who have medical coverage get the short end of the stick from an industry that values profits over treatment. Despite a few characteristically flamboyant publicity stunts (taking people injured in the aftermath of 9/11 to Cuba for treatment), Moore wisely steps back and lets ordinary people tell their own stories. For British viewers, Sicko provides a timely reminder as to just how precious our national health service is.
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Atonement
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Sicko
