Review: "Fahrenheit 9/11"
Written, produced and directed by Michael Moore
3.5 stars
“Are you being fair about this?”
“No, I’m not fair.”
--Jon Stewart interviewing Michael Moore on Comedy Central's The Daily Show
Fahrenheit 9/11 is the smartest, best executed and purest example of timely filmmaking and political propaganda in years. So many ideologically charged documentaries are regretful examinations of the recent-to-distant past: Hearts and Minds (1974), for instance, bemoaned the acts of the American hand in Vietnam. But Michael Moore takes the format a step further, from lamentation to exhortation, by delivering a film designed to target Americans who feel indifferent about the entire Bush/Iraq debacle and bring them into the light (or in this case, the left) before this year's election. Both films, though, are carried by the same current, an underlying plea from the filmmaker to not let these events, these murders, happen again.
Writing for my college newspaper, I grew quickly tired of explaining to everyone who wasn’t a reporter the difference between a news story and an opinion column (forget the editorial). Basically, a news story is an assemblage of facts with as little bias as possible, ideally none, but an opinion column is a researched, biased composition designed to change feelings, call readers to action, and so on. This is where Moore shines. The sheer tonnage of interviews, B-roll, memos, schedules, reports and home videos he’s obtained and collated to support his point is staggering; if Bowling for Columbine was a cry for justice, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a baseball bat to the (metaphorical) head of Republicans, corrupt businessmen and anyone who thinks the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a solid, well-planned idea.
Moore’s point is: Iraq was demolished for personal reasons inside the Bush administration, itself a family with long-running and substantially shady connections to Saudi potentates and conglomerates. Although forcing President George W. Bush to shoulder the blame for several decades of foolish American foreign policy is both unfair and unachievable, Moore’s film paints an unflattering look at the president (thanks in large part to countless public speaking gaffs) as a simple man who, with the aid of family and friends, engineered his rise to the oval office and subsequent semi-related attacks on Iraq in the form of invasion and on the American people in the form of the USA Patriot Act and generally reduced freedoms and edgy populace.
The film opens with our cast of characters being groomed and prepped for camera, an unsettling doppelganger to the opening of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Attorney General John Ashcroft are powdered, preened and primed for the show's performance, which is what Moore stages everything to be: an elaborate performance by the Bush administration to dupe the American people by withholding information from them or deceiving them outright.
Moore’s film, although an achievement in documentaries (however loosely the term is used), is still fairly predictable. The film will certainly inflame Bush’s supporters and receive praise from Kerry’s camp and the large majority of Americans who disagree with both parties but find the war an exercise in imperialism and/or self-genocide.
It doesn't help matters that Moore is beyond smug about all this. Rather than silently heap coals over his enemies' foreheads, he peppers the film with outright insults at Bush and other administration members. Particularly unflattering is a montage of Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, playing golf to "Vacation" by the Go-Go's. Compared to Columbine, however, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a model of restraint and solemn civility. There is only one stereotypically Moorean sequence here, in which the filmmaker wanders around Capitol Hill attempting to persuade members of Congress to enlist ther children for military service. Mostly, Moore lets the footage speak for itself. A ride-along with American soldiers in Iraq is intercut with a series of interviews with a woman and her family in Flint, Mich., Moore's hometown. The woman's son was sent to Iraq, and she turned from lifelong military supporter to confused victim after receiving first letters from her son about the inanity of his being in Iraq, and days later a phone call that told her her son had been killed. Moore is smart enough not to step on the natural tragedy here; the young man's random death does more to bolster Moore's claims and agitate the country's growing annoyance with Bush than any extremist Garofalo-like espousals he could hope to create.
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes plenty of accusations, but it raises even more questions about our country's stability and purpose in Iraq. I enjoyed the film, and was reminded throughout how lucky Moore is to live in a country that lets you make a movie mocking the president and asking us to take responsibility for the disastrous consequences of our often poor choices. With the presidential election only a season away, I can't think of a better way to celebrate the freedoms we all take for granted.
