TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Just a few hours before its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, a Variety preview described Where to Invade Next as “Michael Moore’s look at America’s military misadventures.” Moore apparently kept the actual subject of his first film in six years well-concealed behind its Moore-ish title, which appears to refer to a classified 2002 U.S. government memo rumoured to list six countries American forces might invade after Iraq.
The title, though, is a feint: it is Moore who does the “invading” in his latest film, under an elaborate pretense that barely holds together a dubious premise—that the American dream is alive and well everywhere but in America.
The film’s first, rather limp joke involves the Pentagon enlisting Moore’s help: America, the Joint Chiefs have realised, has problems no army can solve. Moore accepts the challenge, and heads abroad in search of solutions to things like the drug war, health care, nutrition, education, women’s rights, the prison industrial complex, and capitalism run amok.
In the name of restoring one myth—the American dream—Moore constructs another: that of a European utopia. Where to Invade Next is an amalgam of what could be stand-alone segments in praise of one or another piece of European social policy. The American example forms an inevitably dismal contrast to these policies, which Moore offers as evidence that there is a better way.
Italy, of all places, is his first stop. Moore’s humour, never a particularly sharp instrument, has an especially dull, club-like quality in many of these segments. Here Italians are life- and sex-loving Dionysians who live longer, healthier lives in part, Moore suggests, because they take long lunches and get eight weeks’ annual vacation time. Various CEOs make a business case for such largesse, and more than that emphasise that it’s the right thing to do. This becomes a key theme: “If we take care of each other,” a German tells Moore, “life is better. It’s just common sense.” The public good, pride of community, and a socialist, humanist ethos are the end points toward which each of Moore’s journey’s progress. Missing from the mix, of course, are context, counterpoint, and refrain from cliché.
Mostly this is fine. Moore’s American audience (self-selected though it may be) could stand some little enlightenment, and the American crises he describes can hardly receive enough attention. Countries like Slovenia, Finland, Portugal, and Tunisia will no doubt bask in the film’s flattering portrait of their respective societies, not least because Moore makes a direct connection between social policy and a nation’s moral health. Beyond the thicket of sentiment, cherry-picking, and statistic-mongering, much of the information Moore presents is engrossing and even worthwhile. I’m not above taking a certain, Canadian satisfaction, for instance, in an American pointing out that while most of the Western world takes to the streets to preserve things like affordable education, the debtors prison that is the American college system enjoys a troubling public compliance.
Where he has receded into voice-over in some of his docs, Moore is very much a presence in Where to Invade Next—grilling police officers, glad handing politicians and, most tediously, planting American flags. The Moore persona, meant to hold together an otherwise mishmash-y project, too often distracts with its self-regard; at this point the effect on foreigners of Moore’s clueless American act holds negative charm. At times Moore’s propensity for canned wit operates at cross-purposes with his subject matter: the film holds up as a shining example France’s enviable, economical school lunch program. The U.S. might undertake a similar program, he suggests, were it not the case that 60 percent of the country’s tax revenue is allocated to the military. This fact is presented as outrageous, and it is. It is also presented in the wake of Moore’s crack, by way of introducing his “invasion” of France, that “as usual, the French offered little resistance.”
That and other tonal muddling aside, it turns out that Variety’s sight-unseen description of Where to Invade Next is not all that inaccurate. For U.S. military spending and misadventure is arguably what prevents any change involving tax dollars to take place. The film ends by invoking the will to action that brought down the Berlin wall. But to act, a people must first imagine. Moore suggests that many of the ideas he presents originated as American ideas, which further suggests that the American people, at some point, ceased to imagine themselves as the world leaders they are professed to be. The reversal of this failure is itself hard to imagine; better perhaps to let the old myth burn, and by its light forge a new dream, a new way home.
Watch the trailer:
