Sicko

2007; 113 minutes, documentary, directed by Michael Moore, US

Christopher Hitchens once said of Michael Moore, "He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction." I’d agree with the first part and maybe even with the second. And while we’re on the subject I may as well say that Moore’s showboating, his paternalistic and scolding tone, his "hero of the common man" persona all make me queasy. That he seems unable to resist the temptation of the sentimental and the urge to reduce nearly every situation to farce is grating too. Oh, and one more thing: I take it for granted that his facts need to be double-checked.

How sad then that Moore is one of the few documentary film makers with mass appeal and box-office viability to train his camera on working-class people who have collided with America’s corporate juggernaut. In Sicko it’s people who, despite having medical insurance, were unable to get care. There’s the woman who at twenty-two developed cervical cancer and was denied treatment by her insurance provider because she was “too young to have cervical cancer.” Another, an accident victim, was told that after being knocked out in a car crash her ambulance ride wouldn’t be covered because she didn’t get pre-approval for it.

As always, Moore relies heavily on personal testimony and people are taken at their word. Given that we’ve got an unchecked, for-profit healthcare system that is unique in the industrialized world I don’t really think the burden of proof is entirely on the people profiled in Sicko, and I think most of us have heard enough medical horror stories from sources we trust to make their stories ring true. Yet, this points to a problem I have with Moore and also to why I found it so difficult to write about Sicko. Like all Moore’s films much of it feels true and I think a documentary should aspire to a higher level of credibility. It often feels like Moore is a satirist trapped in the role of documentarian, said another way he’s a lazy film maker. No doubt, the extraordinary callousness and inefficiency of our healthcare system is rich fodder for anyone with an eye for satire and it’s important (and horrifying) to know that the world of American healthcare is sort of like what Through the Looking-Glass would be if Kafka had penned it. One man relates his story of severing two fingertips with a table saw and being told at the hospital that they could replace the ring finger for $12,000 or the middle for $64,000. Viva choice. The problem is that these are real people and real situations, and to treat them as satire is at the very least to miss an opportunity. It would be a lot of work to to look closely at the predatory system that they're ensnared in and offer a serious discussion of the alternatives. Instead Moore says "isn't this nuts?," offers a thumbnail history of HMOs in the US and then hits the road for what seems to be the medical paradise of other countries.

Probably the most commented-on element of the film, Moore’s trip to Cuba with US healthcare refugees in tow, is vintage Moore. When he learns of the government claim that detainees at Guantamo Bay are given quality healthcare he sets sail with three boatloads of ailing Americans who have been unable to get treatment and from the prow of the boat announces to the guard tower that he has Americans in need of care. It’s emblematic of Moore’s style and it was a scene that had me rooting for him at the same time I was cringing. My reaction speaks to the ambivalence I have about Moore. I’m glad that there’s a bankable filmmaker who’s willing to show the effects of corporations run amok on ordinary people and I believe Moore is genuinely well intentioned. But he's too vulnerable to the demands of his ego and his films suffer under the weight of his outsize personality.

Moore has been criticized for overstating the benefits of the healthcare systems in Canada, Cuba, France, and Britain and his sunny portrayal of beneficent doctors tending trusting patients within infrastructures that run without a glitch made me wonder what the downsides are. I'm willing to believe that the healthcare systems of these countries are way more humane and efficient than ours and I'm willing to believe that we're subject to much disinformation about "socialized medicine." I'm not, however, willing to believe that medical Xanadu exists anywhere. And here I come to another difficulty in writing about a Michael Moore movie: it's easy to focus so much on Moore’s glaring faults and the deficits in his movies that the larger issue gets lost. In this case, it's that we live in the only industrialized country whose healthcare system doesn’t start from the assumption that everyone is entitled to care. I wish someone else could sell out theaters by saying that, but for now we’ll have to settle for what we’ve got.

Together

2000, 102 minutes, comedy-drama, directed by Lukas Moodysson, Sweden
The more I think about Together the more it seems fair to categorize it as a story of adults becoming—well, adults. It’s a sort of coming-of-age story in which characters stumble into true adulthood by having life experiences, rather than being thrust into it by trauma or disillusionment—although trauma and disillusionment are part of the story.

When Elizabeth flees her abusive husband she and her two children join her younger brother Goren at Together, his Stockholm commune. It’s 1975 and the air is charged with radical politics, feminism, and sexual experimentation. You can see the jokes coming. At one point Goren explains the philosophy of Together to Elizabeth’s children, Eva and Stefan, while he stirs a pot of gooey porridge, “You could say that we’re like porridge. First we’re like a small oat flake—small, dry, fragile, alone. But then we’re cooked with other oat flakes and become soft. We join so that one flake can’t be told apart from the other. We’re almost dissolved. Together we become a big porridge that’s warm, tasty and nutritious…and yes, quite beautiful too.” There’s the ultra-doctrinaire couple who condemn Pippi Longstocking as a capitalist and a materialist. Instead of playing cops and robbers, the kids play Pinochet and torture victim. And on it goes. I have a soft spot for counterculture parodies and I’m predisposed to like anything that sends up smug, wannabe revolutionaries. On this count Together doesn’t disappoint, but what makes this movie stand out from other counterculture parodies is that it’s much more than just a counterculture parody (which there’s already plenty of, anyway). Writer-director Lukas Moodysson gives the characters real depth and dimension and the subtle and nuanced performances he gets from his actors makes us realize that most of them are more than the sum of their silly pontificating and posturing.

Interwoven in Together are glimpses into the lives of the commune’s stuffy neighbors whose stilted marriage drives the man to redefine the term “woodworking” in a way that you’ll just have to see the movie to understand. We’re also introduced to Birger, a desperately lonely many who befriends Elizabeth’s jettisoned husband. Birger pines for his impoverished youth in which he and his farmhand parents shared a two-room dwelling with eighteen other people. “Better to eat porridge together, than a pork cutlet alone,” he says. Now that’s lonely. When mainstream culture is this atomized and sterile you can feel sympathy for the Toghetherites attempts—no matter how ham-fisted—to find an alternative.

In a way it’s Eva, Elizabeth’s thirteen-year-old daughter who’s the anchor of the film. She’s a smart and sensitive kid who sees through to the emptiness that the members of Together are trying to fill with slogan politics and contrived intimacy. You know that she’ll eventually wind up with a therapist who’ll explain the concept of the “identified patient” to her. Eva also sees the intellectual vacuity in the knee-jerk rejection of everything mainstream and the wholesale acceptance of anything with a whiff of the alternative to it. Basically, she’s on to the adults.

Yet, this is a coming-of-age story and the characters change and grow in believable ways. As the movie goes on you see them gradually trade in their pre-fab identities for real ones, which are what they are for all of us: a patchwork of beliefs, preferences, quirks, and values that's generally incompatible with dogma. It’s not that they’ve abandoned the counterculture, it’s that they’ve ceased to be circumscribed by it. Moodysson has done such a good job in drawing his characters that I don’t begrudge them the saccharine sweetness of the giddy soccer game that makes up the last scene. They’re entitled to it and I know it won’t last.

The Mirror

1998, 95 minutes, drama, directed by Jafar Panahi, Iran
The manufacturers of the paykan owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the creators of The Mirror. That’s because for much of the film that’s all we see. Red paykans, white paykans, paykan taxis, paykans from the side, paykans from behind, close-ups of paykans, battered paykans, well-maintains paykans. It got so that I was damn-near giddy when the occasionally motorbike whizzed by.

The film has a quirky narrative structure that pivots on young star Mina Mohammad-Khani’s abrupt announcement that she doesn’t want to act anymore. It starts out as story about a first-grader who tries to navigate the busy streets of Tehran to make her way home after her mother fails to pick her up from school. After Mohammad-Khani quits it becomes a story about her navigating the busy streets of Tehran. The filmmakers decide to leave her mic on and follower her as she travels homeward. It’s then that the meaning of the title, The Mirror becomes clear. It’s about twenty minutes later that it becomes clear that a better title would have been Watching Traffic in Tehran.

The film does include some mildly amusing bits of overheard dialog, like when a man the main character shares a cab with says to his wife, “Women are no slaves, but they should run the house otherwise men will become the slaves.” Or when a nattering and wizened old woman explains that her kids want to put her in an old age home and she says, “Look at me. Do I look like I belong in such a place?”

On her journey home the girl meets one unhelpful adult after another and it made me think that maybe the point here is that finding your way in life is a solitary endeavor, or maybe the whole thing was a metaphor for the primordial longing for order amid chaos, or maybe it was a story about how just when you think you’ve found you’re way you can find out that you’re just as lost as you ever were. I don’t know. Frankly, I’m just glad it’s over.

Citizen Vaclav Havel Goes on Vacation

2006, 77 minutes, documentary, directed by Jan Novak and Adam Novak, Czech Republic

I generally don’t expect a documentary on living under Soviet-style repression to yield many giggles, but Citizen Vaclav Havel Goes on Vacation is so jammed with anecdotes of state-sponsored absurdity that at times it seems more like a descendant of The Good Soldier Svejk than a historical document. In August 1985 Vaclav Havel tipped off the attorney general of Czechoslovakia that he was soon to embark on a summer vacation visiting friends throughout the country. Part publicity stunt, part protest, part “entertainment for my friends,” Havel’s trip was alternately shadowed by what he later calculates as 300 StB (the Czechoslovakian secret police) agents. Along the way Havel is detained twice, the last time under suspicion of “preparing to commit the crime of disturbing the peace.” His friends are harassed and sometimes detained as well. One white-haired compatriot recalls the StB breaking into his home and accusing him of “harboring a subversive document,” the Charter 77 petition that called for government recognition of human rights. A poster that reads “Fuck for (peace sign)” hangs in the background.

Havel maintained a cordial, if condescending, coexistence with his minders. One of his friends recalls him startling them awake in their cars one night with an offer of tea. Watching Havel and his fellow dissidents yuk it up about the bureaucratic idiocy they were subjected to made me wonder if their irreverence and broad perspective contributed to Czechoslovakia’s revolution being a velvet one. I can only assume it was part of their psychological survival. I also kept thinking that it’s no wonder that this is the country that produced Kafka. The danger here, of course, is that it's easy to forget that a buffoonish government can also be a treacherous one (read: George W. Bush and company). I think that’s why filmmakers Jan Novak and Adam Novak include the story of a young poet and dissident Tomas Petrivy, who was found mysteriously dead in his home two weeks after meeting Havel at one of his vacation stops. “The people who weren't known had it the worst. The StB took it out on them,” says an acquaintance of Petrivy.

Like summer vacation itself, this film starts to sag about midway through and I found myself yearning for more depth and insight into Havel and his country. I often find absurdist comedy to be too broad and too one-note to be sustained for very long and sometimes it seemed like the humor was getting in the way of the larger and more interesting story. As an exercise in irony—a slice of police-state life—this film succeeds, but I wish the filmmakers would have aimed a little higher.

Close-Up

1990, 100 minutes, docudrama, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Iran
I just watched Close-Up, a documdrama by the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. It tells the story of Ali Sabzian (who looks a lot like Mahmood Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran) who on a whim tells a woman sitting next to him on a bus that he is his favorite film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. This one-off lie becomes an elaborate deception when the woman, the matriarch of middle-class family, brings the scruffy and sporadically employed Sabzian home and introduces him as Makhmalbaf. From there Sabzian pretends to cast one of her sons in his next film and scouts the house for upcoming shoots.

Kiarostami shoots the trial of the real-life Sabzian in which the family he duped sues him for fraud and "attempted fraud." It's then we find out that the would-be movie star son has given Sabzian 1900 tomans (around $237 US dollars, according to an unofficial source from 2005--hey, I don't have the staff of The New York Times at my disposal. If I did I'd be writing fairy tales about WMD in Iraq, but I digress). Kiarostami also uses the real Sabzian and real members of the family to re-create the scene in which Sabzian first encountered the woman on the bus and some of Sabzian's subsequent visits to her home. He briefly interviews the family and in one hilarious scene the father explains that he knew all along that Sabzian was an impostor, but went along "as a lesson for the children."

It's in Sabzian's eloquent defense of himself at trial that he becomes a sympathetic character. I'm tempted to call him an anti-hero, but he seems too sensitive to warrant that label. He speaks movingly about his love of Makhmalbaf's films and his passion for "art and film." He also talks about the hardship of living at the weak end of the socio-economic spectrum. The economic distress of the society at large is hinted at in an earlier scene when the unemployed, but college-educated son of the taken family talks of his brother who despite being trained as an engineer works at a bakery. It's easy to see Sabzian as a artist whose vision has been thwarted by social inequities and political failures and one understands why he was so easily intoxicated by the respect the family accords him simply for renaming himself--but then there's the 1900 tomans.

Like all Kariostami's movies (or at least the three others that I've seen) this film has a quiet, thoughtful quality about it and the rough-hewn production values add a starkness that seems to cast the characters and story in sharper relief. After the trial the real-life Mohsen Makhmalbaf picks Sabzian up at the courthouse on his motorbike. I really want to know what happen to this guy.

Crazy Love

2007, 92 minutes, documentary, directed by Dan Kloyes, US
The opening scene of Crazy Love has Linda Riss staring into the camera behind dark glasses that look like part of a Cat Woman costume, a lacquered wig perched on her head. It’s an appropriate beginning for a documentary that takes on such a bizarre tale. In 1959 Riss met Burt Pugach, a married lawyer who had grown up poor, but found success as an ambulance-chasing attorney. He owned a plane, a powder-blue Cadillac convertible, and a Manhattan nightclub, where he instructed the house band to play “Linda” when he and Riss made their entrance. “He loved her. She was impressed by him,” says a friend of Riss’s.

Riss was not a woman at odds with the time and place into which she had been born. She was eager to marry and when it became clear that Pugach would never leave his wife she broke up with him and found marriage material in the form of Larry Schwartz, a serviceman whom she’d met on a vacation in Florida a few years earlier. When he heard about the engagement an unraveling Pugach dispatched two thugs to knock on her front door and throw lye in her face. Nearly blinded by the attack, Riss spent months in the hospital and Schwartz called off the engagement. Pugach, who was also the target of a federal corruption investigation, was apprehended and sent to jail for over a decade.

Then it really got weird. When Pugach was released from prison, he and Linda rekindled the relationship and eventually married.

A story as sensational and bizarre as this can easily start to feel leaden after its initial shock wears off and there were moments when the movie bordered on tiresome. Overall though, director Dan Kloyes maintains a deft touch that kept me hooked in to if not riveted by the film. It also helps that within this obviously grim tale is plenty of humor. Most of the interviewees seem like caricatures of fifties-era, working-class New Yorkers decamped to Florida. Leathery and matter-of-fact they seem like kitschy artifacts from an America that had not yet come into full awareness of itself.

Of course, this is a sad and disturbing story and when I think about exactly why it’s so, I come to something other than the attack—ghastly as it was. What I think of is the chorus of friends who encouraged Riss to go back to Pugach. One—a former policewoman who had been assigned to guard Riss in the hospital—recalls seeing an elderly woman returning home with grocery bags stuffed with single-serving items. “It wreaked of loneliness,” she says when she explains why she urged Riss to meet with the newly freed Pugach. Riss, who considered herself “damaged goods” was starting to age. Totally blind, she was unable to work and lived a solitary life in her small New York apartment. Marriage it seemed to her and some in her circle was the only hope of salvaging her life and as damaged goods the choices were few. It’s an equation informed by among other things rigid notions of gender and minds unwilling or unable to question them. Yet, taken in its time and place there’s an undeniable and stomach-flipping logic to it. It’s pragmatism unleavened by imagination. “He takes care of her” said a cousin, “I mean who else is going to run for her?” Good point, sadly.