4 stars out of 5
I know what it’s like, Michael Moore: Sometimes you just can’t win. This was his first movie in a long while to have some “mainstream buzz” behind it, and then on the opening weekend… a Polar Vortex hits the northeast. OK, no worries, I’d just catch it the next weekend. Except, because Moore’s film didn’t pull in Force Awakens bucks in its first week, Invade was dropped to only one screening a day, at 9:35 pm, at my local multiplex. Yes, it’s still in regular rotation at my favorite art theater, but come on: With that audience, you’re just preaching to the converted. Moore shares some amazing, incredibly useful ideas in this very entertaining documentary, but for them to actually take hold — for Americans to demand change — a lot more people need to know about it.
In some ways, this is a kinder, gentler Michael Moore film. There isn’t really a “bad guy” here, except for the stultifying status quo in the United States. Instead, Moore travels the world looking for the best ideas that we could pretty easily steal. Italians are guaranteed 8 weeks vacation a year, and yet their productivity is very similar to ours. Oh, and their workers are treated with respect — crazy, huh? French kids, even in the worst cities, eat well-prepared, healthy, multi-course school lunches. Finland’s schools have the shortest days, shortest years, and no homework — yet they vastly outperform U.S. schools. Oh, and their students are treated with respect. (And, psst, they never teach to the test.) Though for college, you might want to head to Slovenia instead — it’s totally free. Don’t worry about the language barrier; more than 100 classes are in English.
Hard for anybody to disagree with this stuff, right? Yes, Moore also shares some concepts that hardcore conservatives might poo-poo: genuine attempts to rehabilitate prisoners (treated humanely) in Norway. Equal rights for women, and legal abortion since 1973, in Tunisia. (Wait, aren’t they Muslim?) Legal drug use in Portugal. German students learning about their shameful past. (We perhaps have a couple of skeletons in the closet as well.) Iceland prosecuting the bankers responsible for their economic collapse. (A little overlap with the ending of The Big Short.) And so on. There are a lot of laughs here, though sometimes you want to cry.
Because Moore isn’t hounding a villain, the film maybe doesn’t have quite the dramatic arc of his earlier classics. But when all is said and done, the impact is just as strong. Because after being bombarded with all these sensible, not-difficult-to-implement ideas, you realize how many of them were inspired by U.S. ideas. While we’re this behemoth nation, mired in partisan bickering, the world has swiped our best concepts and really run with them. Labor. Education. Justice. Equality. If we truly want to “Make America Great Again,” we need to look for our reflection in the rest of the world, and borrow some concepts back.
I’m with you all the way, except it’s also true that the youth unemployment rate in Italy is 40% and you can’t talk to an Italian person for more than 10 minutes without a mention of la crisi (the crisis). It makes me worry what other important details might have been omitted.
Early on, he does make a blanket statement that he was only “cherry-picking” the positive things, but that certainly does seem relevant.