Film

Sicko (2007)

Director: Michael Moore

Synopsis

Loud-mouthed provocateur Michael Moore’s exposé of the US healthcare industry has been in the works for almost three years now. ‘I don’t think the country needs a movie that tells you that HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies suck,’ Moore said last year. ‘I’d like to show you some things you don’t know.’ No clues yet on what they might be, but 19,000 letters from members of the public about their medical experiences formed part of the research.

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

Gadfly documentarian Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) has irked us plenty in the past, but he'll merit a Presidential Medal of Freedom if this scalpel-sharp exposé of American healthcare chaos achieves its aim—to awaken ordinary citizens to the insane inefficiency and homicidal inhumanity entailed by surrendering control of medical resources to private insurance companies that don’t care if we live or die. If that sounds too much like a Nation editorial to be any fun, rest assured that Sicko is easily Moore’s most entertaining film ever.

Dialing his habitual abrasiveness way back, Moore maintains a newly ingenuous mien while concocting ingenious bits of political theater, (e.g., captaining a boatload of ailing and uninsured 9/11 rescue workers to Guantànamo Bay to request that they be given a taste of the top-notch medical attention enjoyed by the alleged enemy combatants incarcerated there). And if that sounds too flip to be substantive, note that Sicko also contains scenes of unspeakable tragedy, including testimony from the mothers of toddlers who died of easily treatable fevers because some corporate drone did right by the shareholders and denied emergency admission. Equal parts laugh-riot and call to arms, Sicko has reportedly been the subject of paranoid fretting in the boardrooms and spin-control command centers of insurance companies and pharmaceutical conglomerates ever since Moore first announced the project. Here’s hoping those concerns turn out to be well grounded.

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