America's confessional cinema

Two big movies on release at the moment – Michael Moore’s Sicko and the thriller Rendition – have in common a deep strand of American self-loathing. Say what you like about Moore: his films are awesomely powerful and well-constructed. And who can doubt that his target this time – the US health system – is a soft one? But his travels to Britain to see the NHS, France, Canada and even Cuba – all to demonstrate the wickedness of America – are spectacularly credulous. In one scene, he interviews a British GP about how terrific his pay is, how brilliant the system is and (wait for it) how little the British Government intervenes. Wow! That is fantastic! Shame he didn’t discuss MRSA, the waiting times in most A & E units and the closure of maternity units. But I guess that wouldn’t have served his overriding purpose: to show America in a bad light, comparatively.

Rendition is a standard evil-CIA thriller with Jake Gyllenhaal as an idealistic young agent appalled by the practice of extraordinary rendition which sees the Egyptian-born husband of Reese Witherspoon spirited away from a US airport to his home country to be tortured as a terror suspect. Meryl Streep plays the wicked Washington official overseeing the policy. Of course, the husband is a good guy falsely accused and Gyllenhaal’s task is to get him out and back to his wife (and newborn baby etc). The film is not without class: there is a clever twist involving chronology, which I won’t spoil. But most of it you can guess: 9/11 has only exposed and compounded the dark side of the American military-industrial complex, the US has only itself to blame for Islamist militancy and so on. So it is not in itself a threat that needs to be dealt with (Streep gets only one short speech trying to explain herself). Frankly, 24 is a more honest exploration of the moral dilemmas of the war on terror.

For a country routinely accused of lacking self-knowledge, America certainly produces a lot of culture in which it beats itself up. The orthodox explanation for this is that Hollywood is run by liberals. But that won’t quite do, I think. If these films didn’t sell, they wouldn’t be made. The more interesting question is why this self-loathing runs through so much American cinema: I watch hundreds of films a year and the only recent non-American parallel I can think of is Michael Haneke’s Hidden which brilliantly explored France’s guilt over Algeria. But America is a much more complex country than its critics allow. It needs to parade its sense of insecurity and self-reproach. The multiplex, oddly enough, is its collective confessional.