‘Where To Invade Next’ – Film Review

Amusing doc about how the US could become a better place, from the guy behind Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling For Columbine

Michael Moore has been a bug up the ass of America’s powerful for over 25 years, poking his camera at sneaky CEOs, the NRA and George W Bush in documentaries that point a big, flashing neon arrow at what he considers the wrongs in society. Where To Invade Next sees Moore shouting his argument more calmly than usual, travelling round the world to see how countries outside America live their lives. By talking to workers and politicians in, mostly, Europe he learns lessons that might help the US think a little less ‘me’ and a little more ‘us’.

Much that Moore learns won’t be particularly surprising to non-Americans. He goes to Italy and boggles that they luxuriate in eight weeks’ paid holiday a year, five months’ maternity leave and three weeks of paid honeymoon, whereas Americans are legally entitled to none of that. Brits, who sit somewhere in the middle, might only raise a curious eyebrow.

He also might be accused of showing the absolute best of other countries and the absolute worst of the States. He tells a collective of teachers at a Finnish school, who all state a belief that play and creativity are every bit as important as traditional academia, that American schools are doing away with art class. They recoil in horror, understandably, at this statement that doesn’t seem to be backed up by concrete facts.

Yet it’s never been Moore’s aim to provide the answers but to start the conversation, even if he has to present the extremes of the argument in order to do so. The film nudges to think a little differently, to do more than assume a new way of doing things would break everything. As much as the starting point is to sigh at the US and how its belief that it is the best country in the world has stopped it trying to be better, Moore’s film is not anti-American. If anything it’s pro-American, because it wants America to improve, to dream a better dream.

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