Where to Invade Next (15)

four stars

Dir: Michael Moore

Runtime: 120 minutes

HERE is my anecdote about Michael Moore, the special agent provocateur of American documentary making. It was summer 2004 and I was at the Republican convention in New York, looking forward excitedly to the speeches of Dubya and Dick Cheney (I was so much younger then).

Busy minding my own business on the press benches, I suddenly became aware of scores of people gesticulating angrily in my direction. Funny way to greet a visitor, thought I. Then my eye caught the man mountain figure of Michael Moore a few seats away. Far from shrinking away from the mob, Moore was gesturing right back at them, using his finger and thumb to make the letter “L”, the universal symbol for losers, on his forehead. If someone had not distracted the crowd with a free foam finger, free popcorn, or something else free (bibles maybe), Moore might have been in trouble. And he was loving every minute of it.

That ability to divide opinion like Moses is what makes Moore both the most loved and reviled American documentarian. Like some gonzo super patriot, Moore loves his country so much he cannot wait to tell you what he hates about it. But with so many imitators spawned, does the helmer of Roger & Me (in which he skewered big capital) and Bowling for Columbine (America's deadly love affair with guns) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (the so-called war on terror) still have what it takes? After all, his most recent offerings, Sicko (in praise of a free national health service) and Capitalism: A Love Story (an attack on private capital providing public services) had the whiff of the bleedin’ obvious about them.

Where to Invade Next, however, is a real return to form by the big man. Older, wiser, with longer hair, Moore here unleashes his inner hippy with an amusing vengeance to tell America what ails it and how it can be cured.

His starting point is an imaginary meeting with military top brass in which the generals tell him they have not had a success since the Second World War. Their solution: send him out to “invade” countries to steal their best ideas. Thus Moore heads for nations including France (home of delicious and nutritious school dinners), Italy (paid holidays, strong unions), Finland (high quality education), Germany (workers’ rights, making peace with the past), Portugal (decriminalisation of drugs) and Iceland (women to the fore in politics).

The UK is not covered in this Moore tour, presumably because its health service featured so prominently in Sicko, which is fair enough. But Moore could be said to have missed a trick in choosing Slovenia over Scotland as the place where there are no university tuition fees. Doubtless, Moore’s critics will find other faults with the film, principally the glee with which he praises other country’s practices while seeming to bury those of the US. For those who want to take aim at the messenger rather than the message, Moore is an easy target, so unwilling is he to sugar the pill he prescribes.

But if you like your documentaries straight from the heart, Moore is the man. As we see from his reception in certain places, he has become a celebrity in his own right, that shambling, large frame of his becoming the contemporary equivalent of Hitchcock’s silhouette. Other documentary makers can match him for passion, yet few have his feel for absurdity, or his ability to make people laugh over very serious, often life and death, subjects. The usual familiar techniques are here, with Moore throwing news footage and archive into the mix with sit down interviews), but it is done with a renewed vigour. He looks, in short, like a man who is having devilish fun again.

It would not be a Moore film without a sting in the tail, and the one he has here is a doozy. One leaves his film thinking that far from ill-serving America, every country should have a Michael Moore to speak truth to power and, just as importantly, grin in its face. Hail to the chief of documentary makers, back in business again.