DIRECTED BY Neil Jordan
STARRING Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews
US 2007 121 mins.
SICKO ****
DIRECTED BY Michael Moore
US 2007 125 mins.
Who is The Brave One? That would be Jodie Foster, taking out bad guys with a black-market handgun after her life is ruined by a gang of muggers. Critics invoked Charles Bronson’s infamous Death Wish (1974) and lined up to chide the film for being pro-vigilante. Then again, I’m not sure that it is.
Jodie suffers, for one thing. (Charles Bronson never suffered, though admittedly it was hard to tell beneath that stone face.) “Inside you there’s a stranger,” she explains of her vigilante compulsion, sounding like a woman possessed. A talk-radio DJ, she supplements revenge killings with talking on-air about her feelings (her boss thinks it’s tacky, but listeners respond); clearly her main motivation is grief, not rage. She only buys the handgun for protection, and her first kill is pure self-defence. She’s so nervous she can barely shoot – but notices something strange as she walks from the scene. “Why won’t my hands shake?” she wonders, and the answer is clear: Because she likes it.
There’s another odd thing about her vigilantism – namely, it’s unnecessary. The System isn’t shown to be flawed, as it was in Death Wish; the villains don’t get off on a technicality. We’ll get them eventually, say the cops, “we always do”. Indeed, New York has changed since Charles Bronson’s time, as the film points out in its very first scenes; it’s now “the safest big city in the world” – but Jodie, like most New Yorkers, is nostalgic for the old NYC. She talks of the “imaginary city” you create when the real one disappears before your eyes – and the implication is that she creates an “imaginary city” in her mind after her trauma, infecting it with her personal tragedy.
The Brave One looks superb – not just superb but dreamlike, expressing the fever of a mind in turmoil. It’s all shimmers, reflections, dissolves, shallow-focus (see e.g. the extreme close-up of the radio mike, with Jodie’s face out-of-focus though she’s sitting just a few inches behind it). New York buzzes in the night scenes, its neon contours often observed with a tilted camera for added dislocation; individual places – notably the Central Park tunnel where tragedy strikes – are imbued with an almost superstitious weight. On the other hand, the film is atrociously plotted. Terrence Howard (as the cop on the case) contradicts himself at every turn. Jodie’s killings have no clear through-line – sometimes she’s forced to kill, other times she kills when she doesn’t have to; one victim is indeed a villain who’s managed to escape justice, others are just small-time punks who could’ve been scared off without a shot being fired. You know a film’s in trouble when it starts quoting Emily Dickinson and making gratuitous reference to the “Iraqi debacle”.
Is it really gratuitous, though? Yes, The Brave One is muddled and rather incoherent – but Jodie’s mood seems designed to echo the mood of the times, at least in America. She kills because she won’t “live in fear”, spinning a one-off atrocity (9/11, anyone?) into a morbidly hysterical, kill-or-be-killed scenario. At its best, the film taps into a certain mindset, go-it-alone vigilantism based on a feeling of righteousness (war in Iraq, anyone?) – and dares to diagnose it as Taxi Driver-like disguised psychosis. Now that’s pretty brave.
How about Michael Moore? Is he brave? Let’s just say the jury’s out on that one. On the one hand, the stocky figure behind Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) is always outspoken and never afraid to make enemies. On the other, he cuts corners, makes reductive statements without always showing the other side, and is obviously full of himself. Near the beginning of Sicko, he can’t resist telling how a patient’s threat of talking to Michael Moore prompted a medical-insurance firm to do a terrified U-turn and grant his daughter the ear-implants they’d previously denied her. Towards the end, he also can’t resist gratuitously relating how he sent an anonymous donation to an anti-Michael Moore website, allowing its creator to pay his wife’s hospital bills – presumably trying to make himself look big-hearted and magnanimous, except that using the story as a punchline in his own movie makes him look like a narcissistic lout.
In between, Moore fortunately keeps himself in the background – and comes up with one of his strongest films, probably the best since Roger and Me in 1989. There’s quite a simple reason why Sicko – an expos? of the often-inhuman health-care system in the US – works as well as it does. For once, Moore isn’t making a political point, or even a point that has two sides (well, not really). Lots of people voted for George Bush and they’re not (all) insane, but no-one’s against free universal health-care, at least in principle. The world is divided between those who say ‘Yes, it should happen’ and those who respond ‘Yes it should happen in theory, but in practice it’s just too expensive’ – a venal argument that shrivels and dies when confronted with tales of ordinary people’s pain and suffering.
There are many such tales in Sicko. The first tears come before the film is 10 minutes old, and they’re by no means the last. Despite (or because of) his obnoxiousness, Moore is a magnet for people with problems – he’s an attack-dog, and it’s only slight exaggeration to say his subjects use him as much as he uses them. He set up the film by placing an ad (he explains), calling for people to share their health-care horror stories; within a week he’d received 25,000 replies. Here’s a man who sliced off his fingers, then had to decide which finger to re-attach: the middle finger cost $60,000, the ring finger $12,000 (“being a hopeless romantic,” he went for the ring finger). Here’s a woman denied insurance because of some long-ago, totally irrelevant yeast infection. Here’s a cancer patient repeatedly denied treatment with so-called “experimental” drugs, even though his doctor believed they could’ve saved him (he died, leaving a wife and young daughter). Here’s a list of medical conditions that make you ineligible for health insurance – a list so long (ranging from diabetes to Asperger’s) the film presents it in a Star Wars-like crawl, scrolling up into the recesses of deep space.
That’s just one of Moore’s comical flourishes, others including a clip from a Soviet musical used to illustrate 1950s fears of “socialized medicine” – then cleverly extended to point out that many other services in America (from fire-fighters to the Post Office) are in fact “socialized”. He only has two major weapons here – his sense of humour and the terrible stories told by his subjects – but they’re enough; as those antiquated trailers used to tout, ‘It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry’.
Is there a catch? Well, maybe one: the possibility that Moore may be lying through his teeth. There’s no doubt he exaggerates, especially in the second half when he goes globe-trotting, laying out superior health-care systems with the glib assurance of an infomercial. Do patients in Canada really have a maximum waiting-time of 45 minutes? (Apparently not, according to research cited by Moore’s critics.) Is the NHS still the pristine creation defined in its 1948 establishing charter, as read out by Old Labour stalwart Tony Benn? (Definitely not.) Moore’s stunts are showy, taking his sick and lame to Cuba where Che Guevara’s daughter confirms the superiority of Fidel’s system (a cheap shot). His stats are dodgy, like the claim that a baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of survival than a baby born in Detroit. Is this true? A quick Int
ernet search found people ‘proving’ both sides – a sign that it may be arguable but a certain amount of legerdemain is involved.
In the end, though, it just doesn’t matter – because human pain trumps everything, and any system that leaves pain un-salved can, by definition, be improved. Michael Moore is a demagogue, but this time his subject saves him; when his wretched, suffering Americans weep with joy on being told medicine is free in Cuba, larger questions slip away and we weep along. Is Sicko brave? Maybe not, but it’s very effective.
OSCAR INDICATORS
It’s that time of year, when the various critics’ groups and award bodies in the US hand out their best-of-2007 awards – traditionally seen as a sign of what to expect from the Oscars, though in fact the correlation is erratic. Film critics don’t always agree with the Hollywood professionals who hand out the Oscars, though the critics’ darling almost always gets a few nominations.
Then again, Hollywood is going through a dark phase. Last year’s Best Picture went to ‘The Departed’ – and this year it may go to an even more violent film, the Coen Brothers’ deeply pessimistic No Country for Old Men. It’s already won three of the four big awards, named Best Picture by the National Board of Review, the Boston Film Critics’ Society and especially the New York Film Critics’ Circle, the country’s most prestigious. Only the LA critics broke ranks – though they went with another dark, discomfiting picture, There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson, who made ‘Boogie Nights’ and ‘Magnolia’. Daniel Day-Lewis is apparently magnificent in this, and has already won Best Actor in both New York and LA (the NBR went with George Clooney in Michael Clayton).
The big loser so far has been Atonement, the Ian McEwan adaptation with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, which was heavily touted as an Oscar favourite but so far hasn’t garnered anything from the critics (though the NBR included it in their 10 ‘best of the year’ runners-up).
Runner-up in LA was The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, the French drama based on the amazing story of ‘Elle’ editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who was almost completely paralysed by a stroke – only able to move his left eye – yet somehow managed to communicate and even ‘write’ a book about his condition. It also won Best Foreign Language Film at the NBR and is clearly an Oscar favourite in that category, competing with The Lives of Others (New York’s choice) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (LA).
All of the above (except the foreign films) are Best Picture contenders. We could also mention Charlie Wilson’s War with the heavyweight pairing of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, The Kite Runner (set in Afghanistan) and Gone Baby Gone – directed by Ben Affleck! – which is winning Best Supporting Actress accolades for Amy Ryan all over the place. Next on the list are the Golden Globe nominations, invariably fluffier than the critics’ awards. Let’s see if Hollywood can cast off its dark mood in 2008…
