Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, Dr. Daryl Isaacs) 1/2
The old saying goes "you are what you eat", and if that's true, then God help those of us who enjoy the guilty pleasures of fast food, because according to the recent documentary Super Size Me, we're all likely to turn into walking vats of sugar, fat, and poison. This is one of those movies that offers a lot of astonishing facts and figures about fast food and is well researched, and yet most of the time it doesn't even need these factoids to get its point across; the side effects are depicted first hand and speak volumes for themselves.
The film is written and directed by Morgan Spurlock, a new personality in the realm of documentaries. He approaches the topic of obesity as a young man in above-average health, armed with a lot of important questions to which he seeks concrete answers. Some of his research is depicted throughout the picture in the form of statistics, but the real foundation of his quest is a test experiment, in which he challenges the true nutritional value of fast food by embarking on a diet strictly comprised of eating McDonald's meals three times a day for one month.
The diet itself forms the compelling throughline of the movie. Prior to his McBinge, Spurlock gets medicals from three different physicans, who all give him a clean bill of health. Although his vegan girlfriend has her doubts as to the merits of his experiment, she nevertheless intends to be supportive. The filmmaker sets some ground rules too; he has to try one of at least everything on the McDonald's menu (this takes nine days), he has to say "yes" whenever an employee asks him if he wants to "Super Size" his meal, he must limit his amount of exercise each day to under a certain number of steps (to align himself with the national average of regular exercise), and he is prohibited from ingesting anything that cannot be found on a McDonald's menu.
As tasty as fast food can sometimes be, Spurlock has his share of difficulties early on in the proceedings. By the second day, he ends up vomiting outside his car window, and by the end of a week he gains ten pounds. Eventually, he suffers from mood swings, sexual dysfunction and, in one of the movie's more harrowing scenes, a failing liver that may not even last out the full month. With each burger, fry or swig of soft drink he downs, the audience cringes just a little bit more. By the end of the month, the physicians are dumbfounded at his deteriorated health and plead for him to stop the experiment.
Super Size Me also features a number of other memorable moments. In one scene, a group of children can't recognize some of the most basic icons in all of recorded history but have no trouble identifying Ronald McDonald on a cue card. In another, an obese man goes under the knife and gets stomach reduction surgery (all the while set to one of the songs from 2001: A Space Odyssey). One scene depicts various franchise locations unable to pull up the basic nutritional information in McDonald's food, and another demonstrates the kinds of meals which are really available at schools (prominent corporations end up taking care of the unhealthy selections).
As with all documentaries, there are some suspect elements too. Despite the title of novice filmmaker, it would have been more credible for Spurlock to have used someone other than himself as the test guinea pig for the experimental diet, or alternately perhaps he could have had at least one additional person other than himself going on the McBinge in order to compare and contrast the end results. As daunting as the footage of his personal trauma is, we have no choice but to be suspect of its genuine authenticity. The film also loses points for not actually making contact with any representatives of McDonald's head office. Although we see Spurlock make repeated phone calls to the organization, he does not make as much of an effort, or is not as insistent as, say, someone like Michael Moore, who usually walks right up to the front door of a corporation with his camera and asks to speak to a bigwig, pronto.
One starts to react almost on a physical level in watching Super Size Me. There are sequences that are sometimes both funny and scary at the same time, and Spurlock's method of presentation is vastly entertaining. This is one of the better films of the year to date, and the manner in which it is pieced together proves that a movie can indeed be informative without being boring, graphic without being a gross-out comedy, and powerful without resorting to clichéd heapings of emotional McSyrup.
