Michael Moore aims to inspire 'Next' wave
TORONTO — Michael Moore has a lot to say about American exceptionalism in his new documentary, Where to Invade Next. For starters, our cherry tomatoes aren't very exceptional.
The film, which had its world premiere Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival, takes the Oscar-winning filmmaker all over the globe to find countries doing things better than we are, in ways big and small, and one of his best memories was his first meal in Italy with a couple he was profiling.
“They were like, ‘You need to taste this.’ And it was a cherry tomato. I put that cherry tomato in my mouth and, my God, it was a cherry tomato but not what I’m used to.”
Then they urged Moore to partake in mozzarella made from the milk of a water buffalo. “Just the image of that made me sick,” he says. “And I put the mozzarella in my mouth and it just melted.”
So when it comes to America being held up as the best country in the world, "we haven’t just been lied to politically," Moore says. "We’ve been lied to in a lot of other ways.”
Where to Invade Next takes an international tour of countries where Americans could learn a lot from the locals, including gourmet meals for children at French schools, no homework in the Finnish educational system and doctor-prescribed spa treatments for stressed-out German factory workers.
And when the aforementioned Italians discover in the movie that the majority of Americans don’t get anything like the eight weeks of paid vacation and five months of paid maternity leave their companies usually give out, their jaws drop.
They think our ways are “barbaric,” Moore says. “The reason why they look like they’ve seen a ghost is because they’ve been told by their politicians, ‘The more we are like America, the more we’re going to have it made.’ These politicians like (Italy’s Silvio) Berlusconi to the conservatives in Britain and all across Europe have been trying to snip away at the social safety net and turn their country more into ours, where money rules the day.
“The decisions that are made in the United States about whether there is health care or lamb skewers on the kids’ plates is all based on the dollar: How much money can I make by poisoning these kids?”
The poor nutrition of today’s children really needles Moore. If he were to run for president, Moore would “somehow find a way to arrest the people who make the school lunches — not the lunch lady, but the corporations that are putting the slop out there.”
Also on his platform: getting rid of standardized testing (“We’ve left every child behind with this No Child Left Behind nonsense”) and letting every non-violent drug offender out of jail on his first day in office.
“Well, clearly, the gene pool of politicians has been depleted,” Moore says. “You know if you have a copy of something and then you make a Xerox of a copy and then a Xerox of a copy? If you keep making the Xerox of the Xerox of the Xerox, you end up with Ted Cruz."
But “I’m not proposing we do biopsies of political candidates to see if there’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing going on,” he says with a laugh.
He likens the candidates chasing the Republican nomination to “the GOP Arcade Fire. … (Donald) Trump is the best of all of them, in terms of the performance art.”
And sure, the real estate mogul is out in front, but Trump has “the momentum of being in an AMC Pacer,” Moore says. “He’s going faster from 0 to 50 than the other guys, but he’s still just at 50."
Today’s America is probably not what the founding fathers wanted for us, according to Moore, but he wants audiences to be both inspired and depressed when they see Where to Invade Next. (The documentary doesn’t have distribution yet, but the filmmaker expects to have a buyer in place by the end of the film festival.)
“We can get this back,” Moore says. "It wasn’t rocket science to take the Berlin Wall down. Thousands of people started chiseling on it and thousands of people on the other side of the wall were rejecting the government, and you had a good guy like (Mikhail) Gorbachev who wasn’t going to go in with the tanks and kill them.
“There you go, change happened.”