Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore, 2015)
“Prepare to be shocked!” warns the trailer for Where to Invade Next. The film’s firebrand director, Michael Moore, brandishes a six-foot-tall American flag to the low roar of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.” The film is drenched in this imagery, painting Moore as the populist vigilante telling the truths that The Man – in this case, the American government – doesn’t want us to hear. But past the bravado, Moore delivers unsurprising revelations to an audience who already knows them.
Moore places himself in the eye of the camera, the hero of a quest to bring the benefits of European governments back to the good ol’ US of A. Of course, he can’t do this with a straight face; in a jab at US warmongering, Moore calls his visits “invasions,” plundering, among other things, generous workplace policies from Italy, gourmet school lunches from France, and free college education from Slovenia before planting an American flag in the brightly lit landscape of each one.
As the trailer foreshadows, Moore tries to shock his audience with each new invasion; but his discoveries are nothing new. America’s low-quality public school lunches are a well-known issue, and media outlets from cable news to Anthony Bourdain have publicized France’s laudable alternative. In fact, most of Moore’s supposedly revolutionary imports – better paid leave policies for workers, a better prison system, more room for women in the workplace, free college education – have already been factored into American political discourse. How can a film that expects to rest on the laurels of its shock value succeed when most of its revelations come as old news to any audience with CNN on their smartphones?
Where to Invade Next seems to demand an audience politically engaged enough in American foreign policy to laugh at Moore’s satire of American defense policy (and liberal enough to agree with it), but disengaged enough to be surprised by the social progressivism found in European governments and satisfied with the film’s surface-level discussion of them. Surprisingly, such an audience existed at the NYFF, with zealous screening-goers applauding at the film’s moments of triumph before delivering a standing ovation to Moore as the credits rolled and the spotlight found him in the customary director’s seat in the Alice Tully Hall balcony. While the audience expressed their loyalty in cheers and whistles, Moore returned the favor in material form, deploying a team of ushers to hand out a well-made German pencil from a factory he had invaded and a brochure about free college in Slovenia to every attendee at the screening. Since the festival, a majority of critics have lauded Where to Invade Next’s brave, revelatory spirit; if Moore was seeking to buy his audience’s affection, it seems to have worked.
Within the film itself are more transactional elements. Near the end of the film, Moore invades Iceland, set on capturing the rarefied, exotic idea of women in government, and there appears a montage of women, presented without any dialogue or commentary, only a hopeful song to fill the silences around their benignly smiling faces. Meant to be affirming and powerful, this only embodies everything most wrong with the film: rather than truly investigating the issues he’s portraying, Moore takes everything at face value, selling to his audience only token representations of the faith-affirming liberal values that they demand from their comfortable cinema seats. Unlike in his previous issue-focused documentaries, it’s Moore’s shtick that the film centers around, with the issues becoming merely the currency in which he prices his star presence for sale. And when the creation of that currency entails, for example, the erasure of the same women’s voices that the film claims to champion, then the price seems too high.
In his rush to shock, to provoke, Moore ends up condescending to his audience, who might expect something more. Towing his vigilante reputation, Moore, with every new film, hauls in a fanbase ready and willing to be entertained and informed by whatever he has to say. But instead of Where to Invade Next pushing the borders of the status quo, it seeks to deliver no more than surface shocks and petty affirmations, relying on the outlaw reputation of its filmmaker to hide the true banality of its message. What would Joan Jett think?
Author Biography
Christian Leus is a sophomore English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a native of Altheimer, Arkansas. An aspiring film critic, Christian spends her time writing about spectatorial experience and annoying her friends with her opinions.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
Film Details
Where to Invade Next (2015)
USA
Director Michael Moore
Runtime 120 minutes
Follow this link to read the introduction to this set of reviews: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2016/05/21/2015-new-york-film-festival-introduction/
