Michael Moore remains a divisive film-maker. Rivers are wet. The sun is hot. These are all things not worth saying.
Moore, whose work has always preached to the converted, probably doesn’t care much about his position as the cultural figure US conservatives hate more than any other. He should worry a little more about how he divides his own constituency. For every liberal who feels the importance of the message and his undeniable skills as a comic polemicist justify almost any flexibility with the truth, there is another who balks at the tendentiousness, lack of rigour and occasional blatant disingenuousness. (Think back, for instance, to the interview in Bowling for Columbine, conducted around rockets intended for delivering satellites, that implied the interviewee was in a nuclear weapons mill.)
His latest, very enjoyable, scandalously scattershot survey will do nothing to settle that debate. The title is an amusing bit of misdirection. Moore does mention some of the US’s recent unhappy military interventions, but this is just an excuse to stage a fictionalised meeting with the joint chiefs of staff. The brass asks Michael to research what social or political corners of other cultures they might grab for the US.
Moore revels in the huge holidays guaranteed to Italians and (literally) plants the US flag on that policy. No acting is required for him to admire the deliciousness of French school meals. He approves of Finland’s genuinely comprehensive school system. All these will be brought home to the US.
Opportunities to groan
The disingenuousness and inconsistency here is not so bald as it has been in earlier Moore releases, but he stills offers the less faithful opportunities to groan. His unsuccessful attempt to interest French schoolchildren in a glass of Coca Cola is shamelessly unconvincing. French kids drink Coke. I’ve seen them.
His celebration of the liberal regime meted out to a Norwegian murderer sits uncomfortably with his rejoicing at the Icelandic government’s dispatch of errant bankers to the nation’s most remote prison. Is the point that we should actually go harder on financial criminals than those convicted of homicide? I don’t see it.
The main problem, however, is the relentless cherry- picking of each nation’s super-power without any concomitant consideration of that country’s social demerits. To be fair, Moore addresses this towards the beginning. He muses that he is “picking the flowers, not the weeds”.
The metaphor doesn’t hold. With social policy, the weeds are constantly intertwined with the flowers. The result is essentially a piece of utopian propaganda assembled, Frankenstein-style, from the dismembered corpses of various nations’ bodies politic.
And yet, Moore’s cheeky humour remains addictive throughout. He indulges in the odd bit mid-level racism – “as usual the French offered little resistance” – before compensating by comparing his own nation unfavourably with each country visited.
Super montages
There are some super montages, but shots of prison brutality in the US scored to Norwegian screws singing We Are the World feels just a little too on the money. (It’s also a replay of one of Moore’s dodgiest hits: the What a Wonderful World montage from Bowling for Columbine).
All of which is a long-winded way of saying those who’ve stayed with him since Columbine – his 1989 classic Roger & Me was much more rigorous – will find little to complain about. For all his optimism, Moore has little good news for Britain or Ireland. He has said he left out the UK because it’s become too much like the US. There is no mention of our own nation either. Make of that what you will.
