Where To Invade Next, 2015.
Directed by Michael Moore.
SYNOPSIS:
Documentary maker Michael Moore “invades” a number of countries to steal their best ideas and claim them for the USA.
With his favourite target, George W. Bush, long gone from The White House, the past few years can’t have been much fun for Michael Moore. He’s had to look elsewhere and Where to Invade Next is his first film since Dubya left office. And this time he’s aiming at something much bigger and infinitely more complex. America itself.
The film is something of a Borat in reverse – admittedly without the bawdy humour – with Moore travelling to various countries to “invade” them, in other words pinpoint their best ideas and take them back to the States so they can use them and claim all the credit. As it’s pointed out to him, the USA “is good at that.” All these ideas are of a social nature, for the better good of the country concerned, such as the generous paid holidays – eight weeks – in Italy, free university education in Slovenia, worker power in Germany and the liberal Norwegian prison system with no extraordinary punishments and a maximum sentence of 21 years. And the prosecution and imprisonment of the bankers who ruined the financial system in Iceland.
Of course, it’s a selective journey and the picture Moore paints of the countries he visits is tinged with rosiness to the point of utopian. Everybody he meets looks happy, healthy and prosperous, there no sign of poverty or deprivation and that gives his visits an air of unreality. Admittedly, he does acknowledge this while in Norway: having seen the showcase prison in the countryside, he also goes to see a high security unit and, from the outside, it looks grim and foreboding. But what does he find on the inside? Art on the walls, individual rooms for the inmates, each complete with its own shower. So his question about being raped in the showers falls on stony ground.
A large section of the film is devoted to women’s rights. In Tunisia, he finds they have government funded abortion and free health clinics. In Iceland, companies aren’t allowed to have more than 60% men on their boards – or 60% women, come to that. He marvels at the generous paid maternity leave in Italy, observing that there are just countries in the world which don’t offer it: Papua New Guinea and the USA.
For most of the film, Moore’s tongue is lodged firmly in his cheek, there’s the customary twinkle in his eye and, inevitably, many of the people he talks to aren’t in on the joke. It’s his usual style and you can’t help but chuckle when the tables are occasionally turned on him. That “you’re good at that” line is a case in point. But there are times when his feigned surprise is simply too hammy and it grates. It’s balanced by a more serious side to the film, sequences on slavery and how the States doesn’t seem to have come to terms with its past, compared to the Germans who won’t allow themselves to forget The Holocaust. And how today’s US prisons are a source of free labour for some of the biggest international brands. In Moore’s words, “21st century slaves.”
The inevitable pay-off is that all the ideas Moore wants to import into his homeland started there in the first place. And, in a particularly ironic instance, America helped implement one of them: the prosecution of the bankers in Iceland. So his message, just in case we haven’t worked it out for ourselves, is that America has lost its way. It’s become selfish, insular and, therefore, less caring and much poorer, both financially and morally. As a message, it’s not difficult to understand, but in picking such a large and complex target, Moore has his hands full, which gives the film an uneven tone. And he can’t resist a reference to his former adversary. He discovers that the Slovenian alphabet doesn’t have a W and asks if it was dropped before or after Bush became President.
As a documentary, it gets its message across with a mixture of humour and harder hitting news footage and photographs, but there’s a definite sense of Moore having lost some of his edge. Yet, as he walks alongside what’s left of the Berlin Wall, he reflects that “anything can happen ……” In the year of the American presidential election, he’s not wrong.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Freda Cooper – Follow me on Twitter, check out my movie blog and listen to my podcast, Talking Pictures.
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