Toronto 2015: Michael Moore explains why he thinks Europe is better than America

Reporting from Toronto —  Michael Moore isn’t sure what made him decide to suddenly embrace a movie about European progressivism, a subject he says he’s been thinking about since a college trip to Sweden.

Perhaps it was a desire to get back to work after a six-year hiatus.

Perhaps it was life events, like a recent divorce from longtime wife Kathy Glynn and the death of his father.

Or perhaps it was simply a wish to address as many policy issues as he could.

“A lot of the things in that film are things I’ve been saying and thinking about for a long time,” he said in an interview. “Maybe I just decided to put it all into one movie.”.

FULL COVERAGE: Toronto, Telluride and more film festivals

There is much under that umbrella. In “Where to Invade Next,” Moore’s under-the-radar film that premiered Thursday night at the Toronto International Film Festival and is likely to land a distribution deal here, the provocateur is off to see the ways people around the world live better -- “how the American dream is alive everywhere except America,” as he puts it in the movie.

The title (and accompanying marketing image of Reagan-era joint chiefs) is in fact a red herring. Moore is not interested in U.S. foreign policy, but in “invading” other countries to steal their best social and economic ideas, which he says are in many ways our social ideas.

So he hopscotches around Europe to find systems of education, economy and criminal justice that work more effectively and efficiently. He visits nine such places and then, with the mock-disbelief he practiced talking to French citizens in his 2007 healthcare screed “Sicko,” prods them to describe how good their life is, how well their system works and how incredulous they in turn are that Americans don’t have the same system, filling in via voice-over the evidence and background as he sees it. “Where to Invade Next” is filled with well-tanned Italian vacationers, well-rested German workers, well-educated Finn students, well-fed French children, well-adjusted people everywhere on the Continent.

“Where to Invade Next” is perhaps more sprawling in scope than any other Moore film, and is almost certainly his most free-associative piece. Among the subjects we see and learn about: drug decriminalization in Portugal (lower use despite/because no prosecution for users); primary education in Finland (well run because of its de-emphasis on standardized testing and lack of homework); higher education in Slovenia (debt-free and easily available); labor conditions in Italy and Germany (productive and vacation-laden); historical awareness in Germany about the Holocaust (in contrast to more muted teachings about slavery in the U.S.); and the prisoners system in Norway (trusting of prisoners, even resort-like).

(Three other countries were visited, he noted in the interview, but ended up on the cutting-room floor: Estonia, Austria and Canada, the last of which he used to demonstrate the simplicity of the voting system.)

SIGN UP for the free Indie Focus movies newsletter >>

In the last section of the film, Moore veers political, setting off for Tunisia to examine that country’s 2011 democracy uprising and Iceland to look at its tradition of female leadership, concluding that women, because they seek to solve problems instead of find conflict, inherently make better leaders. “Halfway through these countries I realized that when women have power,” he said at a post-screening Q&A, “everybody has it better.”

There is also humor throughout the movie, maybe more of it than in any piece since Moore’s earliest work. When he points out to a lax-minded Portuguese drug official that addictive substances ruins people’s lives and relationships, the official looks at him with a glint in his eye and says, “So does Facebook.”

“Where to Invade Next” lacks a villain, as some pundits have noted, but only in the strict sense of a specific public face. The bad guy in the movie is America’s current way of thinking itself -- Democrat, Republican or any other kind. The overall impression left by “Where to Invade Next” is of a U.S. that oppresses and criminalizes blacks and spends its time and money financing foreign wars. Europeans, on the other hand, just want to live well.

The closest Moore comes to a policy prescription involves taxes. Yes, Europeans pay slightly more, but they get a lot of services in return, he says, in contrast to the mainly military perks Americans get for their buck (59% of the average American’s tax dollars goes to the military, he posits in the film).

And then there is race, on which he noted in the interview he has some concrete proposals as well. “We can get rid of these drug laws; that’s a huge step,” he said. “We can make a commitment to having prisons be about rehabilitation and not punishment. There are so many things we can do. This isn’t just optimism for its own sake.”

Moore was talking to The Times over a late breakfast at the film festival, after having held court in a corner of his film’s after-party, clad in casual clothes and a camo-colored Detroit Tigers hat, until after 2 a.m. Friday morning.

In the chat with The Times, he described several years of deliberately laying low, both as a filmmaker and public figure. His last traditional TV appearance came nearly two years ago, a fact that, he notes wryly and not incorrectly, can sometimes get lost.

“I just checked. It was October 2013. But that doesn’t seem right,” he said. “That doesn’t seem right because I seem to still have some kind of ubiquitous presence. ‘Oh there’s Michael Moore, out there mouthing off.’”

A lot of those earlier cinematic and media efforts came during the George W. Bush administration, in which Moore completed three movies and began work on a fourth. In the nearly seven years since President Obama was elected, he has put out just one film, 2009’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a finance-world investigation he actually began during the Bush years.

He says making this movie was a decision to break away from the 2000s-era material that defined him.

“It became about feeling that I’m making another movie so people could sit there and feel good about hating George Bush. And it was, ‘Really? that’s what I’m here on this earth for?’ I got tired of it,” he said.

Wading out of those waters doesn’t mean his new film won’t polarize. And indeed, the new movie leaves plenty of room for critics to find fault. “Where to Invade Next” closes at the Berlin Wall and how Moore and a friend saw the collapse of Communism back in 1989. “Bang. Chisel. Down,” is their three-word prescription for how it happened. “It’s that simple.”

Of course such assessments ignore the myriad precipitating factors that allowed someone to walk up to the Berlin Wall and start tearing it down without getting shot in the first place, and skeptics might note there is a similar absence throughout the film of the problems that exist in parallel or as a consequence of these supposedly ideal European policies: high unemployment, a lack of Silicon Valley-style innovation and an inability to integrate minorities, to name a few. It’s telling that the word “migrant” does not appear once in the film, and though there are many allusions to the tumultuous relations between America and minorities, Europeans’ struggle to integrate Muslims is barely covered, and neither is how disparate birth rates and the immigrant population are challenging the numbers of a system Moore extols as utopia.

Moore explained his reluctance to include those drawbacks.

“This is what’s said of most of my films. The mainstream media does a really good job of how the rest of the world is bad and horrible and pays so much taxes,” he said at the screening. “And every few years, with two hours of your time, [I show] the truth about what goes on. I … pick the flowers and not the weeds.”

Pressed in the interview that in fact, the weeds might have provided important context, he replied, “If you go shopping looking for something nice to wear you don’t say ‘let me find something crummy.’ Your wife doesn’t say when you get home, ‘how come you only got the good stuff?’ Picking out the good stuff is human nature.”

It’s tempting to see this film as Moore’s attempt to inject himself into another election cycle, as he did with 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” particularly as its female-leadership section could be read as a coded bit of support for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Moore says that was not the motivation. In any event, he notes, his thinking is more aligned with Bernie Sanders’.

(Still, he does have an opinion on the current election. On the Democrats: “Hillary won’t be the next president unless she and the campaign change. She’s still running it like it’s 2008.” And on Trump, he finds a surprisingly kindred spirit. “I understand why people connect to him. People are tired of fake politics. They want someone who says what they believe.”)

Moore said he likes Trump’s ideas on healthcare and Wall Street prosecutions, and is of course in deep disagreement on immigration. “Trump can be a force for good. He just has a few screws loose. Unfortunately, they’re very big screws,” Moore said.

Instead of politics, Moore said the decision to make this movie came from a moment in his life of wanting to take on bigger questions, having recently turned 60 and trying to cleanse his palate by removing himself from the media and entertainment game. “I don’t read the Hollywood trades anymore,” he said. “No offense to them -- they do important work. I just think it’s best to get away from all of that, to get away from all the back and forth. That’s what this movie is attempting to do.”

He offered a further burst of optimism at the screening. Noting a strong economy and contemporary attitude of tolerance in Germany, he said “Jesus. They went from being Nazis 70 years ago. If the Nazis could do this, we could do this.”

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT