Sicko

***.5/****     SICKO (PG-13)

Controversial Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore was the driving force behind two of the highest-grossing documentaries of all-time: 2002’s Bowling for Columbine, which explores the motives behind the massacre at Columbine High School and other violent acts with guns in our nation’s history, and 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which was a harsh critique on the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Three years later Moore returns with another politically charged and controversial documentary, Sicko.

In the movie, Moore investigates the American health care system, focusing primarily on the industry’s for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. Throughout the film, Moore highlights both insured and uninsured Americans who were either denied health care by insurance companies or hospitals, or have had an extreme amount of financial struggles from the costs they have had to endure when trying to battle against serious illness.

Moore also spends a tremendous amount of time on comparing America’s for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies with the universal or non-profit health care systems in Canada, Cuba, England and France. Moore also interviews 9/11 rescue workers who volunteered to help with the devastation and the saving of lives following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but were denied government funds to help them through the diseases and illnesses they developed because of their efforts.

A disturbing documentary that serves as both propaganda and as a much needed wake-up call, Sicko is truly an affecting and entertaining picture. Unlike Moore’s last two documentaries, he spends a larger part of the film behind the camera and offers up less of the smarmy and cynical statements that have always made his movies a slight turn-off. Instead, Moore wisely allows the personal stories and the interview subjects to convey to the audience their feelings and the effects they have felt from this nation’s health care system.

These stories and the interview subjects are intensely effective and bring to light several issues that should transcend political backgrounds and ideologies, and instead speak to the basic human emotions. And while Sicko is based around a dreary and unfortunate topic that allows Moore to attack those he wants in his not-so-subtle way, Michael also throws in a dash of humor that makes the problems and the fight against them that much more powerful.

Moore’s liberal agenda is clearly present and unavoidable, yet despite the knowledge that the movie surely contains some misrepresented facts and the typical misleading editing that almost always accompanies this genre of film, the lack of grandstanding by Moore on-screen has allowed the finer points to stand out, and Michael has succeeded once again in making a motion picture that raises more than a few flags.

An accomplished and entertaining documentary, Sicko ranks as Michael Moore’s best documentary to date.