60 | 3 stars | B
Director: Michael Moore
Cast: Michael Moore
Synopsis: The outspoken documentary filmmaker is back on a tour around the world to ‘invade’ countries with smart social policies, and reclaim them for the US.
Genre: Documentary
Key awards: Academy Awards – shortlist for Best Documentary Feature
Runtime: 120 minutes
Language: English
Singapore rating: M18 (some nudity and drug use)
This is my very first encounter with Michael Moore – I have yet to see his more famous (and in some quarters, infamous) features like 2002’s Bowling for Columbine, on gun violence, and the critique of American healthcare, Sicko (2007). The poster for this film features a cabinet of high-ranking defence generals seated around a table, posing for the camera, so I’d figured Moore must’ve staged an elaborate excoriation of their real-life counterparts, presumably having used actors instead.
I was wrong; Where to Invade Next has absolutely nothing to do with the military, or its interventionist, aggressive foreign-policy stances across the terms of various US presidents. Rather, it plays on this notorious aspect to raise the intriguing question: that instead of invading other states either for oil, or to install anti-communist bulwarks, what if America invaded them for the purpose of stealing their exemplary policies to benefit her own people? Moore thus offers a trip to 9 other countries, 8 of which are European and part of the OECD, a cluster of relatively progressive and developed nations.
And a fairly lucrative trip this is. (If it were on a brochure for some tour agency I’d think twice before tossing it away.) Moore treats us to Italy, where labour rights are a thing and the CEOs actually resemble humans more than they do humanoids; he reveals to us the French arcadia of balanced school meals and steamy sex education; he champions the humane justice system in Norway as opposed to closer-to-home prison brutality, the footage of which is sardonically juxtaposed with the iconic, upbeat supergroup tune ‘We Are the World’. For good measure, Moore pays a visit to Tunisia too, a country “that has something that we don’t – free government-funded women’s health clinics, and government-funded abortions”. All the countries featured in our itinerary are democratic, supportive of free speech and expression, and espouse, to varying degrees, certain socialist principles.
In contrast, American work-hours are a joke, especially so for the working and lower-middle classes; her school meals are little more but vomitous coagulations of mush, attested by the pictures taken by one of Moore’s crew-member’s daughter – in contrast, the French seem averse to Coke; and America’s refusal to honestly approach its shameful history (“born in genocide and built on the backs of slaves”) is starkly humiliated by Germany’s compulsory lessons, memorials, and so on, on the Holocaust. America, in short, has much to learn, and possesses the aptitude for it, were it to look up to these more developed countries and their ways of operating.
This is all an admirable goal set by Moore, and to some degree accomplished in two hours. Moore himself cautions against nitpicking; he’s not out to objectively assess each country, but to single out its star attributes. Never mind that these are mostly proto-Scandinavian models situated in a different context, without – at least – a historically partisan political landscape. These are the ideals America, as a great world power, is more than capable of emulating, if not adopting.
The danger appears when viewers gravitate towards reading the film as a doctrinal manifesto, an activist call-to-arms. With such disparate realities, how can one not feel a burning injustice rise up at the thought of rampant homegrown inequality and suffering? Yes, it is not entirely Moore’s fault for how the audience chooses to interpret his documentary, but his presentation of these phenomena tends to encourage it. The satire is biting, unnecessary at times given that it presents less of American injustice and systemic rot objectively than a cursory, emotional sweep of it. Were he to explore the deficiencies of American education at greater length, instead of just the tragic removal of music and poetry as compulsory subjects, his message would benefit from this enhanced clarity, and therefore be more convincing.
At times, the chronicling of paradise feels choreographed as well. Moore meets up with Johnny and Christina, an Italian working-class couple; Johnny is a policeman, and Christina a retailer. They “wouldn’t shut up about where they had gone on vacation”, as Moore looks on in mock astonishment. Apparently holidays here are affordable and more than tokenistic? Watching this with even just a little critical awareness would tell you otherwise, that no matter how attractive the benefits are, the Italian dream isn’t an open-source one. Unemployment has skyrocketed ever since the 2008 financial meltdown, especially among young, working-class individuals. Unions and labour strikes, while permitted and integral to West European culture, are still caught in a tense face-off with Big Brother and his corporate cronies.
Overall, however, Where to Invade Next has its merits as an insightful, sometimes witty eye-opener into the world beyond the American hegemon, which would do everyone a little good. It’s just that the uncritical packaging of its facts damps down its acerbic, animated, and hence attractive potential.