MICHAEL MOORE IS AT the top of his game. Audiences have made his latest project, Sicko, the fourth most successful documentary ever released. Critics are calling it his most impressive work yet. And he’s basking in the life-giving glow of TV lights while calling his interviewers tools of Big Pharma. And yet, Sicko is the work of an artist in a deepening creative funk.
Whatever else one thinks of him, the idea of Michael Moore as stunted doesn’t come naturally. Beginning with Roger & Me, he’s single-handedly refined a style of documentary film–call it Moore style-that has changed the genre. Moore is fundamentally two artists–one a polemicist, one a comedian–and his style is split, too. The foundation is always a standard left-wing argument. The real life of his work, though, is his inimitable humor: wry montage, deadpan narrative, slick editing, stunts out of a socio-political Jackass and interviews that make powerful people visibly uncomfortable. The effect is pure ying-yang. The passion gives his nonfiction frolics direction and speed. Moore’s inner jester lightens his films’ tendency toward insufferable preaching. And the ambiguity between them leave it unclear why audiences respond to Moore’s work. Are they snickering or pounding their fists on the armrests? Or both?
