MOVIE REVIEW | 'SUPER SIZE ME'

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/movies/07SUPE.html?th

 

May 7, 2004MOVIE REVIEW | 'SUPER SIZE ME' When All Those Big Macs Bite BackBy A.

O. SCOTT

 

uper Size Me, " Morgan Spurlock's affable, muckraking documentary, elaborates on

some facts that everyone seems to know: mainly, that the United States is in the

midst of an epidemic of obesity and related health problems, and that fast food

is bad for you. His attempt to demonstrate the link between these two matters,

using himself as an experimental subject, represents an entertaining, and

occasionally horrifying, statement of the obvious. After all, even the

McDonald's corporation, while defending itself in a lawsuit filed by two

overweight teenagers, submitted briefs citing the well-known health risks of its

highly processed, high-fat foods. McDonald's' victory in the case was followed

by the passage in Congress of a bill shielding the industry from future

liability.

 

Like suits against tobacco companies, such cases — and the larger issue of the

relationship between legal consumables and public health — turn on the question

of responsibility. Does it rest with those of us who eat, drink and inhale the

products that clog our arteries and corrode our livers and lungs, or with the

companies who sell and advertise them?

 

Mr. Spurlock's answer, emphatically anticorporate on its surface, is perhaps

more ambiguous than it seems. After all, no one forced him to consume nothing

but McDonald's food — three meals and more a day, from hot cakes and sausages at

dawn to Double Quarter Pounder combo meals late at night — for 30 days. It was

his choice.

 

Supervised by three doctors and a nutritionist, and observed by his girlfriend,

a professional vegan cook (identified by an on-screen caption as " healthy chef

Alex " ), Mr. Spurlock, a fit, active New Yorker, happily set out to ruin his

health, and succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. There was some weight

gain — 18 pounds by the end of the experiment — and also mood swings, loss of

sex drive and nearly catastrophic liver damage. His general practitioner, Daryl

Isaacs, likens Mr. Spurlock's all-Mac diet to the terminal alcoholic binge

undertaken by Nicolas Cage's character in " Leaving Las Vegas " and worries that

his patient may succumb to liver failure before the 30 days are up.

 

This individual, self-induced medical horror story is accompanied by a jaunty

barrage of anecdotes and statistics. Not content to stay in Manhattan (which has

the highest concentration of McDonald's outlets in the country), Mr. Spurlock

traveled to places like California, where the chain was born, and Texas, not

only the largest state in the union but also one of the fattest. He observes the

eating habits of Illinois adolescents, who are fed carbohydrate-loaded treats in

their middle-school cafeteria, and meets a man (a very skinny man, by the way)

who estimates that he has consumed more than 19,000 Big Macs in his life, the

high point of which might have been the day he ate nine.

 

Mr. Spurlock, originally from West Virginia, works in the good-natured,

regular-guy populist style of documentary rabble-rousing pioneered by Michael

Moore. He is a bit less confrontational than Mr. Moore (as well as thinner), but

he similarly relishes letting polite, well-scrubbed corporate flacks entangle

themselves in bureaucratic doublespeak. In this case, everyone in the food

industry seems to want nothing more than to educate consumers, especially young

ones, to make good choices.

 

Anyone who has watched commercial children's television — where the majority of

the ads hawk food of dubious nutritional merit — has seen such education in

action. There is a funny, revealing sequence in which Mr. Spurlock goes to

several McDonald's restaurants in search of posters and handouts with

nutritional information and discovers that they are difficult to find and

sometimes not available at all. There is a heartbreaking moment when an

overweight girl worries that she will never lose weight because she can't afford

to eat two sandwiches a day from Subway, the diet that made Jared Fogle into the

chain's favorite spokesman.

 

There are also interviews (some conducted over cheeseburgers and soft drinks)

with nutritionists, lawyers and David Satcher, the former surgeon general of the

United States, all of whom raise alarm about heart disease, juvenile diabetes

and other scourges of a society built on cheap, convenient and abundant

calories.

 

The arguments in " Super Size Me " will be familiar to readers of Eric Schlosser's

best-selling " Fast Food Nation, " and like that book, Mr. Spurlock's film is as

much about corporate power as it is about health. His conclusion is that it's us

or them, that we should kill McDonald's before McDonald's kills us. This may be

a little melodramatic, but it should nonetheless give you pause. In any case, it

seems more likely that we will continue to live in a fast-food world, perhaps

more warily (and more queasily) in the wake of Mr. Spurlock's experience. His

movie, which opens nationally today, goes down easy and takes a while to digest,

but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.

 

SUPER SIZE ME

 

Directed by Morgan Spurlock; director of photography, Scott Ambrozy; edited by

Stela Gueorguieva and Julie (Bob) Lombardi; music by Steve Horowitz and Michael

Parrish; produced by Mr. Spurlock and The Con; released by Roadside Attractions

and Samuel Goldwyn Films. Running time: 96 minutes. This film is not rated.

 

WITH: Morgan Spurlock, Ronald McDonald, Dr. Daryl Isaacs, Dr. Lisa Ganjhu, Dr.

Stephen Siegel, Bridget Bennett, Eric Rowley, Alexandra Jamieson and Dr. David

Satcher.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

 

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