“Sicko” and “The 11th Hour”

With the same-day screenings of Michael Moore's Sicko and Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour, the first Saturday in Cannes carried with it some of the political gravitas for which the festival has earned a name (or a nickname, depending on your lean).

Both films corresponded to large-scale agenda, but tackled it with varying efficiency. Moore's Sicko, a long-anticipated documentary from the agent provocateur who won the Palme d'Or in 2004 with Fahrenheit 9/11, seems to be causing just as much of a stir as its predecessor. The trades and the French dailies were buzzing with rumors that Moore had had a copy of Sicko shipped to a secret location outside of the States in case the government confiscated the print intended for Cannes; he revealed his action to be true at a press conference later on that day. Intrigue aside, Sicko, like previous Moore projects, is highly watchable and informative entertainment. He takes an aggressive look at the American health care industry and, through public testimonies and Moore's own inquisitiveness (or, perhaps, inquisition), sizes it up against sibling systems in France and England.

In preparation for the film, an ad posted on the Internet for people to submit healthcare horror stories drew a disturbingly high number of responses. What Sicko reveals is a bleak picture: Forty million Americans are uninsured and live in fear that an injury will drive them to financial ruin. When asked during the press junket how the idea for Sicko came about, Moore commented that on one of his TV programs from the past, he had followed a man who had a chronic illness but went untreated because he had no insurance. He later died. With this new opus, the charges Moore levels at those he criticizes do not necessarily carry with them the pretense of an overnight revolution. But to those assembled, it seemed like a good step forward.

Patience was also the take-home message pitched by Leonardo DiCaprio during his press conference for 11th Hour, a documentary that DiCaprio narrated (and helped produce) and that was helmed by Leila Conners Petersen. One of the key ideas of 11th Hour, which includes testimonies from specialists on the environment (with Stephen Hawking and Mikhail Gorbachev also weighing in on the issues), is that the time to make a difference for the planet can't be any time but now, even though the effects of the changes may only be seen by the next generation. Though the documentary does not convey the unrelenting urgency inspired by An Inconvenient Truth (which screened at Cannes in 2006), the message is maintained: The earth is doing badly, so wake up! DiCaprio's sentiment comes across as consistently genuine, and at the press conference later that day, he lamented America's liability as one of the world's biggest polluters and its responsibility to raise awareness among other industrialized nations. Saving the environment is not about buying a hybrid car or solar panels, he explained, it's about supply and demand; it's about making a statement through many, often small, choices. One journalist in the room asked DiCaprio if he had taken a plane or a train to get to Cannes, underlining the public's often high expectation for self-vetting a public figure's professed endorsements. DiCaprio's retort was for the writer to not worry, that he flies commercial jet-planes as much as he can.

For both Sicko and 11th Hour, it seems that one take home message should be, "Don't shoot the messenger."