Where has Michael Moore been since 2009’s Capitalism: A Love Story? Everywhere, apparently. In addition to writing his memoirs, the populist provocateur has been trotting the prettier regions of the globe to see how the other First World lives and comparing it to our star-spangled super-sized bootstrapped love-it-or-leave values.
His conclusion? We suck.
Where to Invade Next, which documents his secret multi-year benchmarking mission to countries more socialist than ours, is the funniest film he’s ever made. Signature Mooreian outrage at American injustice, which formed the emotional backbone of Capitalism, is mostly contained within this movie’s grim opening credits, a potent audiovisual mismatch featuring sound bites of U.S. presidents spouting bellicose foreign-policy bluster over video of their own nation crumbling domestically: Ferguson, Eric Garner, TSA gropings and voter suppression tactics.
For the movie’s spine, however, Moore’s tone is one of slack-jawed bemusement at the everyday comforts enjoyed by the European democracies he peacefully “invades.” His viewpoint is inherently limited and halcyon: Everything in these Edenic nations looks perfect during their 20 minutes under Moore’s lens, each of them a model country in the specific sector he spotlights at the exclusion of any and all problems. Where to Invade Next is like his controversial Cuban detour in Sicko, but for two hours.
Yet Moore has ingrained a response to this criticism within the running time of Where to Invade Next, acknowledging that while these countries have their problems, “my mission is to pick the flowers, not the weeds.” And since most of us don’t want to watch an eight-hour documentary chronicling every facet of each of these countries, it’s hard to argue with the approach. Accept the movie’s selective horticulture, and you’ll find a quotable revelation in just about every minute of it.
For example, he begins his travelogue in Italy, where the government mandates seven weeks paid vacation, 12 federal holidays and a two-week honeymoon for employees, and egalitarian CEOs in union-supported factories sing the virtues of two-hour home-cooked lunches for all workers. It might cost the company some profits to treat its employees so generously, but one boss even says, in a trailer-ready retort, “What’s the point of being richer?”
In France, Moore invades an elementary school in one of the more economically pinched regions of Normandy. But school lunches are nonetheless fit for a president, with faculty meeting with dietitians and local government officials to curate gourmet, four-course meals served by a wait staff. There is not a vending machine onsite, and when the chef, who claims to have never consumed a hamburger, views video of American cafeteria slop, his level of pain is almost physical.
Education is also the selling point of Finland’s democracy, where teachers have all but outlawed homework, shortened students’ time in class, and focused their motivation on each child’s individual happiness — moves that have led to the country’s distinction as the world’s best-educated. The faculty appears genuinely aghast that art and poetry are not mandatory studies in the curriculum of every American child.
And so on, from free college tuition in Slovenia to Germany’s thriving middle-class to Portugal’s legalization of drugs to the remarkably lenient incarceration system in Norway, where basic jails resemble bucolic resorts and maximum-security prisons offer all the comforts of a college dorm. Everywhere, the citizens of these nations express their disbelief that the U.S. hasn’t adopted similar humanist approaches. Much of this is genuinely funny, and at the same time it isn’t. Moore doesn’t tell us — and he doesn’t need to — that the result of our nutrient-deficient school lunches is a national obesity epidemic, or that the brutality with which we treat our prisoners only sows resentment and leads to higher recidivism rates, not a lessening of them.
Moore can’t help but hop on his soapbox at least once, when discussing the thorough amount of Holocaust education in Germany’s schools — and the pitiful absence of similar national self-criticism in American textbooks regarding our history of slavery, genocide and war crimes. It’s arguably the first time a Moore film brought me to tears, both by the profound acceptance of German students’ historical shame and by the implications of the calculated whitewashing of our own legacy.
So yeah, there’s a lot going on in this wide-ranging, slightly overlong treatise, not all of which hits its mark. Moore could have completely excised the Tunisian sojourn, whose primary mouthpiece is an educated young English-speaking woman whose harangue about American incuriousness is too preachy even for Moore. His sentimental film-closing look at Iceland’s gender-equality progressivism also might have been left as a DVD extra, to place even more emphasis on that nation’s recent prosecution of its banksters.
But there’s enough vital reporting and illuminating first-person candor in this lopsided polemic that every American should see it — yes, even the knee-jerk conservatives prepared to blast its anti-Americanism. For the liberals, of course, it’s timely catnip.
For the first time in at least my life as a voter, there is an American candidate whose policies mirror Moore’s “flowers.” Where to Invade Next is the best campaign advertisement Bernie Sanders could ever receive, without once mentioning his name.
WHERE TO INVADE NEXT. Director: Michael Moore; Distributor: Dog Eat Dog Films; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Cinemark Parisian in West Palm Beach, Regal Downtown at the Gardens in Palm Beach Gardens, Cinemark Palace and Regal Shadowood in Boca Raton, Cinemark Paradise in Davie, Muvico Broward in Pompano Beach, the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale, Regal Oakwood in Hollywood, AMC Aventura and AMC Sunset Place in South Miami