This isn’t what you might expect, though it’s quite in line with what Michael Moore has said before. There’s a more positive, upbeat note than usual, though. Moore has created a punchy and exhilarating tribute to the various liberal-welfarist traditions of nations from Europe and elsewhere. He cheerfully tours around, “invading” these countries and pinching their good ideas, with a view to bringing them back to the US, ideas such as France’s healthy school meals, Italy’s statutory paid holidays and Germany’s worker participation in boardrooms – defending them as tax-efficient and socially necessary.
This movie is a cousin to his excellent Sicko, an attack on America’s private health insurance, and in its scepticism about America’s military spending it’s also a distant relative of his Fahrenheit 9/11 – and yet again I repeat my admiration for that film, which in 2004 attacked the invasion of Iraq before it was fashionable, and was at the time derided by the same jumpy commentariat who later quietly accepted Moore’s line as the truth.
So is Moore naive about these nations? At times, they look almost news-less in their utopian calm, even when Moore is talking about the Norway’s Breivik massacre or Iceland’s financial collapse. And he appears to take at face value the protestation of Italian employers that they are “happy” to give their workers benefits – after an Italian trade unionist has told him that these benefits have had to be fought for. But this is such a bracing and optimistic and doggedly idealistic film, simplistic in the sense that it believes that things like feminism are simply right.
