If Michael Moore had any self-restraint, he might be a really great man.
The activist filmmaker and cultural fuse-lighter, the slinger of “Roger &Me” and “Bowling for Columbine,” is back with his wildest project yet. First “Fahrenheit 9/11” lost its distributor (Miramax was told a stern ixnay by parent company Disney), then it won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
What is this hot potato? Let us paraphrase Henry Miller, another joking provocateur. This is not a movie. This is a gob of spit in the face of … well, the Bush administration. And Michael Moore’s aim is dead-on.
Moore begins with the disputed 2000 election and does not break stride for 116 roaring, reeling minutes. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is roughly arranged in two halves. The first has Moore on his worst behavior, a scattershot attack on Bush, characterized by a scene imagining the thoughts running through Bush’s mind as he is sitting in that Florida classroom, in the minutes after he has been informed that planes have crashed into the World Trade Center.
Moore also plays the war against Afghanistan as an episode of “Bonanza,” and crosscuts tearful relatives of Sept. 11 victims with Bush’s particular brand of gravity-free glibness.
Sure, you could argue that right-wing radio hosts and conservative news channels use the same unsavory methods. And you would be correct. But Michael, just because the other kids are doing it doesn’t mean you have to descend to their level.
More troubling is that Moore’s cheap-shot tactics will detract from a discomfiting portrait of the coziness that exists between Saudi Arabia (including the bin Laden family) and the Bush family and other key players in the current administration – a case Moore lays out in detail.
The second section of the film covers Iraq. Moore’s digest on why the war is being waged isn’t exactly news, but it is skillfully and passionately rendered. Especially devastating is our acquaintance with Lila Lipscomb, a middle-age woman from Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich.
She’s a (literally) flag-waving wife and mom, and fervent supporter of the military, whose daughter served in the Gulf War and oldest son was sent to Iraq. When we see things through her eyes, all of Moore’s sarcasm ebbs away, and something real and raw shines through.
As usual, Moore is lucky in what he gets on camera. He gets a congressman (a Democrat) to blithely admit he didn’t read the Patriot Act before voting for it. (Incidentally, one of Moore’s talking heads is Washington’s Jim McDermott, an ardent Bush critic.)
Moore also has the good fortune to be standing across the street from the Saudi Embassy – apparently for the sole reason that it’s amusingly located opposite the Watergate – when members of the Secret Service approach him and ask him what he’s up to.
Will this movie change a presidential election? There is a sequence in “Fahrenheit 9/11” in which a mother reads a letter from her son, a soldier, who was killed in Iraq. The letter includes the phrases “thank you for the Bible” and “that fool in the White House.”
This movie will not change the minds of many conservatives or liberals, but if enough moderates see just this scene before November … yes, a few votes might change.L
“Fahrenheit 9/11” is the work of an angry polemicist, albeit one who can’t resist a punch line, no matter how irrelevant. See it with a critical eye, and reject it, or cheer it on. (And I must report that the preview audience with which I saw the film applauded and cheered the film’s rousing ending longer and more lustily than I have heard an audience do in more than 20 years of reviewing films.)
Decry Michael Moore’s slippery techniques, or absolve him because he’s the only snarling attack dog the left seems to have. But see the movie.
Associated Press/Lions Gate Films
In a scene from “Fahrenheit 9/11” Michael Moore (right) talks with Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) on Capitol Hill. Moore spent a day there approaching pro-war members of Congress to recruit their children to fight in Iraq.
“Fahrenheit 9/11” HHH
Its aim is dead-on: A passionate broadside against the Bush administration, wrought by Michael Moore in 116 roaring, reeling minutes. Moore’s tactics are often slippery, but in the second half of the film, a brief on the Iraq war, he captures some devastating material.
Rated: R for violence, language.
Now showing: Grand, Meridian 16, Neptune, Woodinville 12, Cascade
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