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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Morgan Spurlock's much-heralded Big Mac attack is way more fun than it is preachy. In other words, he's no Michael Moore.
May 7, 2004 | "Super Size Me" is the latest example of a specific type of instructional nonfiction filmmaking in which the director also appears as the lead character -- the approach taken by Michael Moore in pictures like "Roger & Me." In this case, director Morgan Spurlock, dismayed by American obesity statistics (particularly among children), decided to eat nothing but McDonald's fast food for a month and film the experience.
You have to be at least marginally self-centered to put yourself at the core of your own movie. And even if your aim is to reveal the sleazy irresponsibility of corporate America, the risk you run -- one that Moore seems completely clueless about -- is that you might come off as nothing more than the spoiled, foot-stomping superstar of your own cause. That is to say, in championing the cause of the "little" people, it's easy to fall in love with how smart you think you are.
Who knows how he pulls it off, but Spurlock generally avoids those traps in "Super Size Me." Spurlock is certainly a presence in the movie: We follow him as he treks to McDonald's restaurants across the country, from New York to Los Angeles to points in between, including Houston (which, at the time he made the film, was statistically the "fattest" city in the nation) and Detroit (which had stolen that dubiously honorable No. 1 slot by the time the film was completed). And the whole enterprise obviously stems from his questioning vision: It's a good example of an individual's recognizing that the political is also personal, particularly when it comes to the food we eat.
But "Super Size Me" is exploratory, as opposed to being just numbingly didactic, and that's what makes it so engaging. Spurlock was inspired to examine the possibility that Americans are "eating ourselves to death" when he read about the two teenagers who sued McDonald's last year, claiming the company had caused their obesity. But Spurlock doesn't automatically assume the "big corporation bad, little guy good" stance -- in other words, he doesn't seem to have a lot of patience for lazy righteousness. (It's worth noting that Spurlock's career as a filmmaker has included music videos and corporate work. His bio notes that he won an award for a corporate image piece he did for the Sony Corp. -- which suggests not that Spurlock is necessarily sympathetic to big business, but that he has some sense of how it works, and of how it wants the public to perceive it.) At one point Spurlock just comes out and asks the question, "Where does personal responsibility stop and corporate responsibility begin?" The key is that he asks it without smugness -- in other words, it's a question to which he doesn't already know the answer.
"Super Size Me"
Directed by Morgan Spurlock
"Super Size Me" shows Spurlock eating (and, in one scene, regurgitating) masses of fast food, day after day. His plan requires that he eat only from the McDonald's menu (water is included), he has to eat everything on the menu at least once, and he can't exercise. (A New Yorker, he doesn't even do the normal day's worth of walking most Manhattanites do, opting to take cabs everywhere.) Along the way, Spurlock is supervised by various doctors and health professionals, one of whom warns him that he may be pickling his liver with this diet high in fat, sodium, refined sugars and Lord knows what else.
