Philadelphia Weekly

Sicko
C-
Director: Michael Moore
Starring: Michael Moore et al.
Opens Fri., June 29

A buddy recently quipped that in another lifetime George W. Bush and Michael Moore probably would've been great friends. This sounds outlandish at first, but chew on it for a little while.

Both are millionaires who strive to pass themselves off as "regular folks"--there's not much difference between Moore's carefully cultivated blue-jeans-and-ball-cap getup and our president's Crawford brush-clearing regalia. Both Moore and Bush address the American people in the condescending tone one might take with a developmentally delayed child, and there's never a crisis in our complex modern age that can't be resolved with a simple declarative sentence. Neither gentleman has much interest in gray areas.

Speaking as someone who sees the world as an endlessly complicated and terrifying place, I personally find such reductive black-and-white worldviews profoundly unhelpful, no matter which side of the aisle they come from. I know I'm violating the unspoken agreement among good liberal-minded folks, as we're all apparently supposed to gloss over the unsavory aspects of Michael Moore's methods and demagoguery, at best admitting that his shenanigans and distortions aren't any worse than what Rush Limbaugh does on the airwaves every day.

This may be true, but I don't like Limbaugh either. Shouldn't we be aspiring to something better and more substantive?

These thoughts, as well as many, many more, danced around my head while trying to stay awake during Sicko, Michael Moore's tedious, child's-eye view of the American healthcare crisis. It's tough to generate much controversy here, as anyone who's been to an emergency room lately will loudly concur that the system is pretty much fucked.

With our Congress in the hip-pocket of lobbyists, passing blank-check prescription drug bills so the insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies can reap untold billions in profits, this should've been the perfect subject for our filmmaker's peculiar brand of man-on-the-street muckracking. There are so many executives and politicians just begging to be humiliated in this scenario, it's stunning how little interest Moore has in following through.

Instead Sicko turns out to be the same 30-minute movie repeated four times in a row. Moore sat down with dozens of Americans and asked them to tell their Kafka-esque tragedies of denied care, bureaucratic red tape and crippling co-pays with catastrophic consequences. It's all seriously scary stuff, especially once you realize he's sticking with the lucky folks who actually have health insurance, instead of the millions who don't.

But such tales of woe are cheapened immeasurably by the filmmaker constantly cutting away to his visits in foreign lands, touring federally funded hospitals in Canada, Britain, France and even Cuba--finding nothing but luxurious, state-of-the-art treatment where every citizen is happy and healthy and nobody ever has to wait in line. Moore puts such an absurd, anecdotal rose-tint on these exotic locales, I could think only of the Sean Penn puppet in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police explaining that in Saddam's Iraq children frolicked in rivers of chocolate.

And that's pretty much all there is. American HMO horror stories intercut with paradise overseas. Rinse, wash, repeat ... wait for the credits. (You could leave after the first half-hour and you'll have seen everything Sicko has to offer.) I appreciate that Moore's trying to make a case for socialized medicine, but his methodology is so crude, simplistic and redundant that you'll walk out feeling like you know even less about the subject than when you walked in. Of course we'll never, ever see a dissenting viewpoint in a Michael Moore movie, but how about offering even a cursory explanation as to how these other countries manage to pay for such lavish standards of care?

Sicko is Moore's slackest, most enervated work yet, lacking even the cheap-shot satirical zing of his previous pictures. An early segment on Hillary Clinton's ill-fated universal healthcare proposal feels weirdly truncated, as if executive producer/big-shot Clintonista fundraiser Harvey Weinstein took over editing duties for a few minutes. Not even a hilariously damning audio clip of Richard Nixon and John Ehrlichman talking up early HMOs can keep the proceedings aloft for very long.

The final bad-taste stinger comes from the saga of Jim Kenefick, a man who spends a slightly scary amount of time debunking our filmmaker's cinematic sleight of hand at the website Moorewatch.com. A couple years back Kenefick hit a bad financial patch when his wife fell ill, until out of the blue her medical bills were miraculously covered by an anonymous donor. No points for guessing that Moore himself cut the check, and then saved this revelation for the closing act of Sicko.

So is this a magnanimous act of charity, or simply a case of shivving your opponent when he's already down? Somewhere out there Karl Rove is smiling, wondering why he didn't think of it first.