In the interest of getting “hard” copies of my work under one roof, I plan to spend the next few weeks posting the entire archive of my film journalism here on ScullyVision. With due respect to the many publications I’ve written for, the internet remains quite temporary, and I’d hate to see any of my work disappear for digital reasons. As such, this gargantuan project must begin! I don’t want to do it. I hate doing it. But it needs to be done. Please note that my opinions, like everyone’s, have changed a LOT since I started, so many of these reviews will only represent a snapshot in time. Objectivity has absolutely no place in film criticism, at least not how I do it.
There was once a time when I was pretty disgusted by Michael Moore movies. Sure, he said some funny things, and his heart seemed to be in the right place, but he acted as a fear-monger, oftentimes while criticizing the very type of fearmongering he was the best at dishing out. His films were always digestible and frequently entertaining, but I never could escape the notion that if America was in as bad a shape as he proposed, and for the reasons he proposed, maybe it wasn’t really worth saving. Ultimately, his films seemed to detail all of our society’s problems without offering much by way of solutions. But Where to Invade Next takes a different angle, and it really works. I know this sounds odd after such an intro, but I do consider myself a Michael Moore fan. This is why I found myself adoring his latest film. The Moore at the center of this film is much less of the self-important pundit who began to manifest after his big Oscar win for Bowling for Columbine, and much more the likable troublemaker from The Awful Truthand Roger & Me. He’s much more affable and much less confrontational (likely due to age and having lived for 8 years under the Obama administration), and the subject matter is much less accusatory. In the film, Moore travels to a litany of foreign countries to see how they handle a variety of social processes which are hot topics here in the US, such as reproductive rights, labor unions, drug law enforcement, sex education, college tuition, and even school lunches.
The idea is that Moore, as a representative for America, will be “invading” each country to claim their ideas as property of the United States. After each segment, he plants a flag and moves on. It’s a silly way of giving the movie a click-bait title, but the content is worth the forced novelty. As he works his way through each society – and doing so while looking sooooo much like the stereotypical fat American – the viewer would be right to question whether or not Moore is getting the whole story. There are certainly omissions regarding how each society is portrayed (in Tunisia, women have full reproductive rights, but it’s still a very very bad idea to be openly homosexual), but none of these omissions are meant to be deceptive. As such, the message of the movie is sound: America has strayed away from some of the concepts which used to be at the heart of its ideals. Where to Invade Next effectively posits that these concepts are not terribly hard to implement … we just need to want implement them.
If the goal of the movie is to make us want to do just that, it succeeds. Moreover, it champions the idea of small progress. Doing something – doing anything at all, really – is valuable. For the first time since Roger & Me, I left a Michael Moore movie feeling inspired rather than doomed, and as far as “America homework” documentaries go, this one is much more fun to watch than Citizenfour.
Where to Invade Next is now playing in Philly area theaters.