Movie City Indie

In front of porta-potties from “Oui Oui Enterprises,” a greyhair in a Hyde Park baseball cap drones about “the modern agnostic.” The scene is readily caricatured, but by 5:30, the area teems, and the frail yet resolute Terkel is as inspiring as the pungent, impassioned polemic from medical professionals about how a single-payer system might cut greed from the medical industry and how Sicko could be activist equal to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” (Studs’ socks, as always, are a brighter red than the scattering of crimson scrubs.) Terkel has brought a brick with him, given to him years ago by Moore, the last brick from a union hall. “One heavy mother!” he repeats, and says Moore can justly proclaim, “I don’t wear Italian shoes!” Moore, in shorts and t-shirt, squints in the sun, and works like a pol on the stump: “Money should not be part of the equation! There’s no room for it when we’re talking about people’s lives! You cannot allow the Halliburtons of the health care industry into this equation. The first word in our founding document is We. Not me the people. We the people.” The crowd cheers. “If you can find the money to kill people, you can find the money to help people. Let’s do this, America!” Turning my head from the stage as Moore exits, it seems most of the assembly of a few hundred are wiping their eyes.

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WAS IT ALL JUST A DREAM? A colleague who saw the Chicago sneak preview of Sicko (2007, ***) on the Saturday night before the film's June 29 opening said he or she felt privileged to be among a crowd so electric, so as one massed as one in righteous anger. (Me, I saw it with a bunch of critics.)

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I wonder if that will be the reaction once Michael Moore’s latest, most mature movie makes it out into the world, a world, where, triggered by the movie’s release, the TribuneCo’s Los Angeles Times devoted a front page story to the failures of in American healthcare yet saw fit to interweave a martial drumbeat of assertions that movies never change behavior, movies never did, movies never affect politics, movies never will, and there is no way in the world that the healthcare industries would ever, ever concede an inch of ground or percentage point of proift. Whatever Moore’s latest agit-pop polemic achieves, it does point out that the for-profit healthcare system is broken and the lives, physical and fiscal, of much of the citizenry are wracked because of it. In two hours, his jocular appreciation of the health systems of France, the United Kingdom and Cuba are by design more provocation than Discovery Channel style recitation. But Moore’s larger point once you get through the faux-naif act obtains, and while he makes this clear in his film, he made it clearer in Grant Park on the first day of summer when he told a crowd largely composed of healthcare workers, “If you can find the money to kill people, you can find the money to help people.” Another phrase rings in my head, one of the greatest phrases ever, the first line of the Hippocratic oath, “First do no harm.” Then, see “Sicko.” Now, talk about it. Go ahead. Change the world. [Ray Pride.] [Photos (c) 2007 Ray Pride.]

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