Moore asks what other nations can teach us
Michael Moore has made the movie that everybody thinks about making after visiting Europe for the first time. “Where to Invade Next” is all about the great ideas from other countries that we might think about trying. It’s about how nice it is in France, Germany and Italy — and Slovenia and Portugal and Norway and Iceland. It’s not that we have it so bad here but that other countries have it good, too, and in some areas, they have it better.
For many Americans, the mere concept of this documentary will be heretical. Aren’t we the greatest? Doesn’t everybody know that?
The central gimmick of “Where to Invade Next,” which borders on silly, is that the U.S. keeps getting into wars and getting nothing out of them. Instead, Moore will invade countries on his own. He carries a big American flag with him and plants it into the ground every time he hears a good idea, claiming the idea for the U.S
He goes to Italy first, where he endorses government-mandated, seven-week vacations for everybody. Apparently, industry in Italy doesn’t collapse from this, and management and labor get along fine. Moreover, Italians live a lot longer than we do in the United States, probably because they’re not overworked, overstressed and miserable.
In France, Moore checks out the lunches being served to schoolchildren. You’d be amazed. It’s good food and somehow produced for less money than in the United States.
Some of the things Moore uncovers seem, from an American perspective, positively surreal. Going to prison in Norway, for example, looks like an enforced vacation. The prisoners have their own rooms and their own keys. They read in the library. They go swimming, and nobody is ever knifed in the shower or sexually violated. It’s hard to imagine how such a thing could work, but according to Moore, the recidivism rate is a very low 20 percent.
When Portugal made drugs legal, drug use went down. When Iceland experienced a financial collapse, they actually prosecuted the people responsible for it. In Slovenia, college is free, and in Germany they’re facing their Nazi history rather than sweep it under the rug.
As a piece of filmmaking, “Where to Invade Next” gets off to a strong start but sags in the last half hour. It makes a lot of interesting points and, in the way it shows other countries, conveys something about the U.S.: There is just something harsh about American life, and it dates to Tocqueville and beyond. You feel it when you get back from vacation, turn on the radio and everything sounds like one loud migraine.
Who knows if the ideas and solutions of other countries could work here? Moore, at least, offers something to think about.