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After traveling for an hour to sit in a crowded room of angry and crying people, I had a big fight with my partner right on the middle of the street. We were not assaulting each other for any of those men are from this planet, women are from some other planet reasons. Feeling dejected and bitter, we could not contain our emotions because we had just heard the stories of people who had been abandoned by our own United States to die slowly, painfully, and without dignity. Am I being too cryptic? Let me clarify: we had just heard Michael Moore tell it like it really is in SiCKO and damn it, the truth hurts.
I don’t want to spoil the film or lessen the documentary’s full emotive effect for those who have plans to see SiCKO after its June 29th release date next Friday, but I will say that as always, Moore combined his sensitivity, patriotism, insight, delving analysis, and just the right touch of sarcasm to tell the stories of those who have otherwise not been heard despite their all-too-painfully-familiar paradigms.
Moore’s most recent film is not just an inoculative needle prick about the ills of the American health-care system, it is a far more invasive undertaking that delicately picks apart all of the wrongs and injustices predicated by the inherent greed and capitalistic lust that underlies social policy in the United States. Using average American citizens as his surgical tools, he dissects the systematic political artifice to find insurance companies that rob the sick and dying, politicians that cheat the elderly, a lack of social concern for future generations, blatant imperialism, murder, and disrespect for those who have sacrificed when the United States government failed to care for other people.
Most notably, Moore does not only travel around the United States for his documentary. He also travels to England, France, Canada, and Cuba. What he found in those places were people who felt profoundly sorry for Americans, people who asked how a country as powerful as the United States could abandon its most vulnerable citizens at their time of need. The highlight of the film is undoubtedly Moore’s surprise trip to Cuba with three boat-loads of sick people in need of treatment. Moore does an excellent job of destroying the myths and stereotypes that are often perpetrated by the American media about these countries and the people who live there.
Unfortunately, SiCKO does not offer any solutions to the problems posed in the film. But, what it does do is make you feel angry and confrontational enough to go out and demand some answers and solutions from the powers-that-be.
