VIEW PHOTOS: Michael Moore at Cannes 2007

And why not? This is a movie, not a position paper, and Moore aims to entertain as he informs. And he's not aiming his polemic at people who've studied up on health care issues. Indeed, his folksy approach, which frequently finds him playing the faux naïf — "I always thought the health insurance companies were there to help us," he says in a too-wondering, too-wide-eyed tone at one point — can grate a little. I imagine it can grate a lot if you've got no truck with what he's trying to say. But from where I sit, he's a very successfully engaging filmmaker.

And he asks a painfully pertinent question late in the film, after chronicling how a certain university hospital made a practice of throwing uninsured poor patients into cabs and directing said cabs to homeless shelters after said patients were found to be unable to pay up: Does America want, he asks, to be "a country that dumps its citizens to the curb when they can't pay their hospital bill?" And this question is where the movie's heart is.

After asking it, though, Moore overplays his hand. His much publicized gambit of taking 9/11 volunteer rescue workers to Cuba to get the medical care they could not get in America would make, at the very least, a compelling narrative, and at first it is. Moore's not off base when he notes that the U.S.'s trouble with Cuba is a result of its replacing a dictator we did like with a dictator we don't like. But then he goes way off base, indulging in the nefarious trend of Che chic by interviewing Dr. Guevera's daughter. He chides the U.S. for demonizing Cuba at the beginning of the sequence, and then goes on to egregiously and inexcusably sentimentalize the place. That the 9/11 workers were able to get medical care there that they weren't able to get here is more an occasion for bitter irony than valorizing Cuba's government.

This blunder vitiates the power of Moore's question, and gives his detractors a pretty handy excuse to evade or ignore it.

— Glenn Kenny