WRITING FOR a monthly magazine requires a long lead time. These columns are turned in several weeks before you see them, so they need to be timely, but not too timely. And that can be frustrating. But from now on, whenever I am tempted to complain about that fact of life, I will instead think of poor Michael Moore and the way current events have conspired against his latest movie, Where to Invade Next.
Way back in the 1980s, with the surprising success of his comic deindustrialization tale Roger and Me, Moore stumbled into a career as a feature-film director. But at heart he remains what he always was: an advocacy journalist. He wants to tell the story of his times in a way that will inspire people to act for change. In fact, his last job before he started making movies was a brief stint as editor of the monthly Mother Jones. Two constant themes resound through all his work, in any medium: outrage at the gross injustice of the U.S. economic and political order and faith in the capacity of ordinary Americans to change things.
But feature film is an even more unwieldy vehicle for telling the story of one’s time than a monthly magazine. The financing and logistics are byzantine and overwhelming, and the lead time is measured in years. A few times over the past three decades, Moore has managed to overcome those odds and get a message into the theaters at exactly the right time, most notably with his fall 2004 release of Fahrenheit 9/11. The national release of Where to Invade Next was scheduled for the same week as the New Hampshire presidential primary, the first primary of the season, apparently with the hope of hitting the election-year sweet spot again.
The movie’s premise is that Moore will break the U.S. military’s losing streak by invading other countries—not to change their regimes, but to steal their best ideas. With that, Moore is off on a tour of Europe, claiming long paid vacations and maternity leave in Italy, worker participation on corporate boards in Germany, top quality schools with no homework in Finland, free higher education in Slovenia, humane prisons in Norway, reasonable drug policies in Portugal, a crackdown on corrupt bankers in Iceland, and universal health care pretty much everywhere. Apparently to dodge charges of Euro-centrism, Moore even takes a side trip to Tunisia, where the post-Arab Spring government was putting an equal rights for women clause into its new constitution.
But by the time most viewers will see Where to Invade Next, its litany of Europe’s social democratic achievements will already be long familiar as the basis of Bernie Sanders’ claim that the U.S., “the richest country in the history of the world,” could do better.
In addition, Moore uses the recent history of tiny, picturesque Iceland to launch an extended riff on the idea that things go better when women are in charge. That seems odd from a guy who is old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher, and it only makes sense as a play to influence the potential 2016 election of the first female U.S. president. However, the policy directions suggested by the rest of the film only make sense if one thought that female president was going to be Elizabeth Warren.
Where to Invade Next is still fun and occasionally inspiring, and it was probably expecting too much to think that Moore would catch the election-year zeitgeist again. In any case, he has, again, pulled off the not-inconsiderable trick of getting a shiny new piece of anti-capitalist content into U.S. malls and multiplexes, and we can’t start taking that for granted.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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