Monday October 12, 2009
Wanting Moore
By AMY DE KANTER
Micheal Moore’s documentaries do better at the box office than most feature films. With good reason.
DOCUMENTARY directors are like theatre actors. You know they must be working out of love because there is no way they are doing it for the money. As far as documentary makers who have become rich off of their work, you can probably count them on one hand, if not one finger. That well-deserved honour goes to Micheal Moore.
I am not sure that “documentary” is the correct word to describe Moore’s films. They are true stories and they most certainly are educational. However, the word documentary also implies a lack of bias or at least a subtlety to messages that allows the audience to draw its own conclusions.
Moore is anything but subtle.
He is famous for his outrageous stunts which have become classic film and TV moments. Burned in my memory is an excerpt from his TV show The Awful Truth. Moore rounded up several people who had lost their voice boxes due to smoking and took them “carolling” to big tobaco companies.
Genius. Moreso because there was nothing the companies could do about it. Who could have been Scroogy enough to take on a group of Christmas carollers?
Moore dedicates himself to airing his own country’s dirty laundry, thereby commiting what some of his countrymen consider the ultimate treason: suggesting that the mighty United States might learn something from other countries.
Over the years Moore has taken on such all-American institutions as:
The Gun Lobby: No amendment to the American constitution is more hotly protected than a citizen’s right to bear arms. It is easier to buy a gun than it is to buy certain cold medicines. A child has more legal access to a gun than to a pack of cigarettes. Moore’s Bowling For Columbine centres on a high school shooting in which two kids walked into their school and started shooting classmates and teachers. Notice I’ve said “a” not “the” because there have been others.
If anything were to make people consider the restricting of gun sales, the Columbine shootings would have been it, but instead gun sales went up, way up!
As way of contrast, Moore went into Canada and walked in through the unlocked front door of a house. “Thanks for not shooting me,” he tells the surprised but completely unviolent residents.
Patriotism: The glorious duty to fight America’s enemies was centre to Bush Jr’s presidency. In Farenheit 911, Moore exposes the real motivation behind the war as well as the hypocrisy of calls to fight for freedom. He approaches members of congress who voted to invade Iraq and invites them to sign up their own kids to die for the cause. Nothing doing. The soldiers come from other, poorer places, where government policies and costly mistakes have ensured large numbers of young people for whom going to fight, possibly die, in the desert, is a step up in quality of life.
Among the jaw-dropping moments is the admission that the so-called Patriot Act (which allows the government to spy on its citizens) was passed without anyone actually reading it.
The Insurance Industry: If anything dashed the world’s view that the streets in the United States are paved with gold, it was Moore’s 2007 film Sicko. Here he points out that a baby has a better chance of survival in El Salvador than in the American city of Detroit. He goes abroad to Canada, France and England to film the bewildered faces of residents when he asks things like “how much do you have to pay (the hospital) before they let you out of here?” He plays a clip of a physician who is haunted by all the patients to whom she had to deny treatment because they were not appropriately covered by insurance. At least one of these men died unnecessarily.
Moore’s famous stunt in Sicko was to take a boatload of ill people to Guantanamo Bay, the only piece of American soil in which healthcare is universal.They were not allowed in on account that Guantanamo Bay is also a detention camp infamous for stories of cruel treatment and torture of inmates. So Moore and his friends made a detour to Cuba. Here, even as foreigners in this very poor country, they were welcomed at the hospitals, looked at, cared for, treated.
Bewildered by how easy it was to be treated, some of Moore’s friends (and at least one audience member) welled up with tears.
Capitalism: Supply and demand, making it rich, the American dream. Capitalism: A Love Story is Moore’s most recent film. He has had his usual share of scathing critism, this time because as he is financially successful, a posterchild for the American dream. Yet Moore is anything but a capitalist.
In a move typical of him, during the first two nights of this film, theatre tickets were handed out free to the homeless and to “anyone who had fallen on hard times.”
In this film he takes on a system that has left hundreds of thousands of workers destitute in one of the richest countries in the world. Richest is an odd term, by the way, for a country in which the wealthiest 1% have more than the poorest 95%.
Although his methods are considered controversial, I fully admire Micheal Moore because when he does get down and dirty it is always to fight an opponent who is bigger, more powerful and already residing in the gutter. Moore fights on their grounds, not his.
Moore’s films are a rollercoaster ride. They make your heart ache, your fists clench and your stomach churn. His star-studded casts include presidents (former President George W. Bush is a frequent source of bufoonery), CEOs and famous actors.
What makes Moore’s films so watchable is that they are funny. There is more to laugh at in one of Moore’s films than in the most hilarious of comedies.
But in the end what is most admirable about Moore is his bravery, both to take on the big guys, to tell it like it is and to stand by what he says. When the accuracy of Farenheit 911 was attacked, he considered offering a reward of US$10,000 for anyone who could find a factual error. Guts combined with a heaping dose of creativity and humour guarantee that audiences will always be left wanting Moore.
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