UPDATED BELOW (June 19, 4:45 PM)

By an incredible stroke of luck, and with a little scheming, I was able to see Michael Moore’s new film Sicko ten days before it arrives in US theaters. By now we’ve all heard the stories of Moore’s trip to Cuba, his anonymous donation to a political rival facing a health crisis, the near-reverent reception at Cannes. All stories for another day; I just want to talk about the movie.

Moore’s toned it down a bit in this one; far fewer jokes and very little of the guerilla street theater that defined his earlier films. He’s willing to step aside and let things unfold, tossing in a bit of narration here and there, but mostly letting his subjects speak for themselves. Just a few minutes into the film, it’s clear this was the right choice. In the opening minutes we meet a couple, once reasonably comfortable, who have been forced into bankruptcy by their medical costs, despite being insured. They’re moving into a spare room at their daughter’s house, and not long after they arrive their son pays a visit to lecture them on their irresponsibility. It’s depressing, and hard to watch, and this is just the tip of a massive fucking despair-iceberg.

Before long we’re watching interviews with cancer patients who were denied care because their conditions were not considered life-threatening. Most of them, we soon learn, are now dead or dying. We meet people who have lost spouses and children because their insurance deemed life-saving procedures “unnecessary”. Current and former employees of the insurance industry talk about their work in the same halting tones as an old soldier wondering how many people he killed. You’re goddamn right Mike isn’t telling a lot of jokes this time out.

Of course, the director comes out in favor of universal health care — he’s Michael Moore, after all — and this is where the tone of the film brightens somewhat. He provides an admittedly silly summary of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to introduce health care in the early days of her husband’s administration, before moving on to her opponents. We’re treated to a montage of conservative politicians and pundits explaining that universal health care is the first step down the slippery slope of Soviet tyranny, and describing the bureaucratic nightmare of Canada’s health care system. In classic fashion, Moore heads north of the border.

The Canadians he talks to seem quite happy with their health care system, as do the people he meets during his trip to Great Britain. In France he dines with a group of American expats who regale him not only with tales of free health care, but of daycare centers, paid maternity leave, sick days that last as for long as you’re sick, doctors who make house calls 24/7, and five weeks of paid vacation a year. By the end, France ends up look like some kind of fantastical paradise, minus the jet packs.

And then there’s the Cuba trip. Having learned that volunteer 9/11 rescue workers were being denied coverage for the lingering effects of digging through the rubble, Moore decided to take them to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where “enemy combatants” receive free medical care in addition to all the waterboarding. Denied access to Gitmo, the group makes its way to a Havana hospital, where Moore requests the doctors treat them no better or worse than Cuban patients.

This sequence, and that request in particular, promise to become a source of controversy in the months to come. People have already questioned whether or not the trip to Cuba was legal, and others are accusing Moore of dishonesty, claiming he requested top-of-the-line treatment for the patients, then saying otherwise in the film. More charitable opponents claim Moore himself was duped by the Cuban doctors, who put on a good show for the Americans before returning to bureaucratic business as usual once the cameras were gone.

I honestly don’t know, and I don’t have the resources to find out. I’m sure that, before long, people with press credentials and expense accounts will have picked over every second of Sicko, each hoping to push their own agenda, each omitting the findings that hurt their case. The “objective” analyses of Sicko will end up far more biased than anything in the film, which is a little silly. Sure, Moore’s become a liberal poster boy, and a punching bag for conservative commentators, but this film doesn’t take sides in the way pundits would like us to think it does.

Contrary to what Moore’s many detractors would say, this is not a left-wing propaganda piece. Everyone — liberal, conservative, and everything else — will come away outraged at the way insurance companies treat the people they claim to protect. No matter your feelings on universal health care, it will be hard to deny that the system we have now represents the very definition of “hopelessly broken”. Perhaps the coldest of capitalists will be able to rationalize insurance companies’ practices as “good business sense,” but one would have to be a seriously evil bastard to ignore how little sense those practices make from a medical perspective.

I know I walked away deeply unsettled, baffled by America’s refusal to adopt the kind of health care system that has succeeded in the rest of the industrialized world. None of those countries have fallen into oppression, even as our leaders tell us such a result is inevitable. Nobody in England goes bankrupt because their appendix picked a bad time to explode, and yet the Bolsheviks never quite took over. Why, if I didn’t know better, it would almost seem like our government was full of stubborn idiots who don’t give a shit about you.

You know what? Fuck all y’all, I’m moving to France. Have fun picking out tiny caskets for your dead uninsured kids, assholes.

Update: As of right now (4:45 PM on June 19), it’s very easy to obtain your own free copy of Sicko from any major torrent site. Although this is technically illegal, I support anything that will put copies of this movie into the hands of people who might have avoided it otherwise. Nonetheless, I plan on going to a theater on June 29, and paying real money to see this movie, and I urge everyone reading this to do the same. A lot of people will have a lot of unkind words for Sicko no matter what, and I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of a box-office failure.