With Michael Moore stopping by today at 11 a.m. EST and other reviews of SICKO pouring in, I wanted to update with the brief review of the film in the New York Times today in their Cannes Journal.
Update 10:13 CST: I also found the Chicago Tribune's coverage of the film and Moore's press conference, and have added that accordingly.
The positive reviews are already pouring in. Fred in Vermont diaried the film's glowing review in Salon, while cartwrightdale covered the positive reviews from Fox News, who called the film "brilliant and uplifting." (!)
The New York Times has not published a full review yet, but there is a short entry in today's Cannes Journal.
Here, edited for length and fair-use stuff, is the brief review:
Aw, Shucks! Provocateur Takes on Health Care
... A persuasive, insistently leftist indictment of the American health care system, as well as a funny valentine to all things French — and many things Canadian, British and Cuban — the film shows that while Mr. Moore remains a radical partisan, he has learned how to sell his argument with a softer touch. He’s still the P. T. Barnum of activist cinema, but he no longer runs the entire circus directly from the spotlight.
(snip)
Mr. Moore has always been a canny rhetorician: He’s a master of the obvious observation and the pseudo-naïve question. These can be effective ploys, but they sometimes come across as maddeningly condescending. Early in "Sicko" he says, "I always thought that the health insurance companies were here to help us," a statement that the very existence of this film proves preposterous. It’s as if Mr. Moore’s didn’t want his Everyman persona to look or sound too smart, a tactic that results only in dumber movies. He’s on firmer ground when he lets other people do the talking and when he takes his entertaining show on the road to Canada, Britain and France, where in between nicely timed comic bits and man-on-the-street encounters, he explores the many pluses if none of the minuses of universal health care.
(snip)
Mr. Moore’s larger point [in his trip to Cuba] is that there is something terribly wrong when one of the world’s poorer nations can care for its people while the richest, most powerful nation in the world lets its citizens literally rot on the street, as happens every day on Los Angeles’s skid row. In "Sicko" greed is the pathogen that has diseased a health care system in which all Americans, including those who think that the H.M.O. card in their wallet has them covered, are the terminally wronged patients. MANOHLA DARGIS
I'm glad to see this. I had been waiting to see what the Times crew thought of the film, and I can't wait to see it myself.
It sounds as though the Times agrees with the assertion that this is Moore's most powerful film to-date, and that he operates above the partisan rhetoric of Fahrenheit 9/11 by appealing to all Americans. Apparently he doesn't make the film a stinging indictment of Republicans per se; however, the Times notes that you cannot watch the film without recognizing who is to blame for the sad state of our health care system.
Finally, on an academic note, film reviews have been proven by film scholars and economists alike to function not as an influence on audiences to go see the film, but rather as an early or leading indicator of how the film will eventually perform at the box office. The research indicates that good film reviews correlate most strongly with long-term, rather than short-term, box office success. Reviewers write with the tastes of their audiences in mind, so the greater variety of sources that praise the film, the larger its overall audience will be, and the more success it will have at the boxoffice.
With that in mind, considering the reviews from Salon, FoxNews and The New York Times, I think we can expect SICKO to not just hammer the instability of the health "insurance" industry, but to blister the box office as well.
Update 10:13 CST:
The Chicago Tribune also has a positive article about the film, if also perhaps using heavily-political terms in the process. But then, perhaps the "liberal" label helps in Chicago!
In 'Sicko' and Health at Cannes
... Health and wellness aside, Michael Moore, who won the Palme d'Or three years ago for "Fahrenheit 9/11," is the fest's fondest idea of the Beautiful American. He's the earthy liberal antidote to the Ugly American spirit embodied, in the eyes of many, by a certain world leader whose very name and image tends to get a lot of "Ahhh-OOOOO!!!" catcalls from festival audiences.
Thanks to "Sicko," which Moore declined to enter in Cannes competition this year, the Ugly American spirit has a new emblem of heartlessness. The film sets out to get the audience good and enraged over what Moore sees as the insurance and drug companies' stranglehold on the American health-care system.
While "Sicko" may indulge in Moore's usual factual glosses (the "documentary" part) and crude simplification (the Canadians, Brits, French and others, he says, "live in a world of 'we,' not 'me'"), only an HMO president would deny his basic point: This cannot possibly be the best we're capable of in terms of insuring our citizenry.
This article, like the Times review, isn't overwhelmingly glowing and does take issue with some of Moore's rhetorical style, but again does demonstrate the importance of the film. I think it looks good for the film to have a very strong box office, and run for a long, long time this summer.