Where to Invade Next – first look review

With direc­tors like Joshua Oppen­heimer, Lau­ra Poitras and Patri­cio Guz­man hog­ging the head­lines with their rich, hard-hit­ting and rich­ly cin­e­mat­ic polit­i­cal doc­u­men­taries, you’ve got to won­der if there’s any room left at the table for Michigan’s favourite son, Michael Moore.

The good news: yes there is. The bad news: it’s in a high chair, with a plas­tic bib and a set of plas­tic cut­lery. His new film, Where to Invade Next, is a work which smacks of a film­mak­er entire­ly lost for inter­est­ing ideas, con­vinc­ing lines of argu­ment, a com­pelling mode of visu­al sto­ry telling – hell, even the basic abil­i­ty to film a sub­ject or a land­scape in a man­ner which is aes­thet­i­cal­ly functional.

With­out get­ting into the real meat of the film, it must be said that, on a tech­ni­cal lev­el, this film looks like it was made by stu­dents with a bud­get of zero and equip­ment bor­rowed off their ama­teur wed­ding pho­tog­ra­ph­er neigh­bour. It’s edit­ed like a dis­pos­able info­tain­ment late night news pack­age, replete with Moore’s egre­gious, sar­cas­tic voice over. Yet his films do pose an inter­est­ing ques­tion regard­ing a cer­tain elit­ist ten­den­cy in doc­u­men­tary film – is Moore attempt­ing to court an audi­ence who wouldn’t tra­di­tion­al­ly go to the cin­e­ma to watch a documentary?

Is he active­ly attempt­ing to dis­tance him­self from a brand of hard jour­nal­is­tic rigour or some/​any kind of visu­al poet­ics which might alien­ate a non-art­house cin­e­ma goer? Is he pur­pose­ly dumb­ing down his mes­sages and his meth­ods, or is it a result of his own defi­cien­cies as a filmmaker?

The film itself is not, as the title might sug­gest, an(other) hys­ter­i­cal broad­side at the ques­tion­able for­eign pol­i­cy deci­sions of Rums­feld, Bush, Cheney et al, but a hokey, cov­er-all ban­ner for Moore’s own whistlestop jour­ney around Europe in search of ways in which Amer­i­ca can improve itself. Because Amer­i­ca is in bad shape. We know this because Moore pieces togeth­er a two-minute mon­tage of tele­vi­sion news reports – the same news reports he chid­ed in pre­vi­ous films for being biased and hys­ter­i­cal – of all the awful things that are hap­pen­ing right now.

You’re ini­tial­ly made to think that Moore real­ly, real­ly hates Amer­i­ca, yet watch­ing this film, you feel that ​“hate” is maybe too strong a term. He’s quite peev­ed and annoyed and agi­tat­ed with Amer­i­ca right now, but to have some meaty con­text for a movie, he has to at least attempt to con­vince that every­thing is going, to quote the best­selling Richard Lit­tle­john nov­el, to Hell in a hardcart.

The mood changes when he reach­es Euro­pean climes. Here we have romance and poet­ry and basic decen­cy and taste and empa­thy and equal­i­ty. Every­one walks around with per­fect tans and flow­ers in their hair, hug­ging each per­son they bump into on the street, hand­ing them free mon­ey, telling them that they’re awe­some. Noth­ing bad ever hap­pens in Europe, and if it does, every­one is cheer­i­ly mag­nan­i­mous about it and hap­py to con­front and dis­cuss the chron­ic sins of their forefathers.

And so with this set-up in place, Moore hops between locales, search­ing for pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy ideas and say­ing that he’s going to steal them and take them back to the US. And that’s it. You can’t help but think it would have been more valu­able and excit­ing to actu­al­ly place these pol­i­cy ideas in front of the Amer­i­can peo­ple and try to dis­cov­er why they are not imple­ment­ed as law. What have Amer­i­cans got against healthy school meals? What have Amer­i­cans got against a penal sys­tem which adopts meth­ods to rein­te­grate crim­i­nals back into soci­ety? Why does Amer­i­ca refuse to deal with bank­ing malpractice?

It’s a weak, weak film, every sug­ges­tion couched in old-timey plat­i­tudes and zero sense that the pop­u­lous would actu­al­ly want any/​all of this. The film talks direct­ly to a hard lib­er­al audi­ence, but any­one with any instinct for polit­i­cal real­i­ty would see straight through Moore’s down­home non-argu­ments. It’s episod­ic, ram­bling, and in the way it latch­es onto eth­nic stereo­types as a short­hand to intro­duce each new coun­try, also patro­n­is­ing and simplistic.

It’s a far cry from the right­eous anger and sin­gu­lar­i­ty of intent found in a movie like Roger & Me. If the direc­tor opts to make anoth­er movie, here’s hop­ing that he actu­al­ly decides upon some­thing to he wants to say first.