Fahrenheit 9/11
Grade: A
Cast: Michael Moore, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H. W. Bush, John Conyers
Director: Michael Moore
Rated: R
Running time: 125 minutes
BY PHILIP MARTIN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Macabre and at times inappropriately jovial, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a dark and powerful work that suffers less from the director’s relentless self-aggrandizing and smirky condescension than his previous work. It is an important film that Americans of all political flavors — including those who believe themselves apolitical— should see and consider.
That’s not to suggest we ought to accept Moore’s arguments at face value, or that we should not understand the context in which this movie is being released. There is an unfinished quality to the piece, it feels urgent in part because it means to keep us apprised of an ongoing story. It is a political act, a blow against the current administration but with some special vitriol reserved for those Democrats — like Tom Daschle and Al Gore — who Moore feels didn’t do enough to prevent the ascendancy of George W Bush.
Does it overreach in suggesting that perhaps the president’s real loyalties lie not with the American people but with his familiy’s Saudi friends? Perhaps, but Moore marshals his facts into a compelling case, and those unfamiliar with the prominence of the bin Laden family in Saudi politics or the close relationship between the Bush family and Saudi Prince Bandar are likely to be shocked. (Though the links have been thoroughly explicated in Craig Unger’s best-seller House of Bush, House of Saud there’s at least one revelation in the film that will give all but the most pragmatic neo-conservative pause.)
Yet the Saudi links are not — as we were led to believe during Moore’s 2003 Oscar night diatribe against the president — the real meat of this junky yet affecting work. If they were, the imminently dismissible Moore could be marginalized by his critics as a grumpy old leftist, a conspiracy monger with a taste for political rough housing.
Only it appears that even Moore was sobered by the seriousness of the subject he undertook to explicate — that the terrible and unequivocal finality of war shut his smart mouth. For about halfway into the film, the cheap shots and easy one-liners vanish, Moore himself recedes from the stage, and we’re left to look on the damage wrought when cold steel meets soft flesh. While it is possible to argue, on an abstract level, that war is a sad by necessary human endeavor, and that we must resign ourselves to the grim news and heartbreaking images, up close war is nothing except madness.
Whether you buy into Moore’s theories or not, there is no escaping the consequences of our national will; no way to spin the blood and pain into something noble and worthy. War is about dead kids and broken men, about the mechanics of destruction and the sad effects on the boys called upon to do the button-pushing.
We see American soldiers, post-adolescents in their shaved heads, wondering at the differences between war experienced and the sanitized gore of their video games. (The smell is worse in real life.) They pump heavy metal through their tank’s communication system — Megadeath rings in their helmets. No wonder they can be conditioned to abuse or torture the enemy, molded into callous and
The rich and the powerful are insulated from the carnage, as is Bush, as is Moore, and as are most of the people who will express opinions about this movie. We send our kids to kill their kids, they come home with nervous disorders or missing limbs or not at all.
When Moore commandeers an ice cream truck and rides around the Capitol, reading the Patriot Act over the loudspeakers, ostensibly to members of Congress who failed to read the bill before passing it, he comes off as a clown. It’s could be seen as the frivolous grandstanding of a profoundly silly man. Maybe he senses this, because he cuts the scene short. Maybe Moore has a sense of shame as well.
It should be noted — loudly and often — that Moore is not a journalist so much as he is a propagandist, or, if you will, a polemicist. He is not concerned with balance or fairness, and he makes no attempt to contain his righteous indignation or to mask his contempt. In this way he resembles no American commentator so much as Rush Limbaugh, in both his refractory lack of subtlety and willingness to push the envelope of responsible hyperbole. Moore would have us believe the president is worse than an amiable dunce, that he is a genuinely evil person. Like a lot of cynics, he indiscriminately ascribes his worldview to others.
There may be nothing in Fahrenheit 9/11 that will change the minds of those who believe our unwholesome adventure in Iraq is essential to the War on Terrorism, but Moore has a real point when he suggests that the most pressing threat to America is the culture of often irrational fear incited by those ready and willing to sell us the illusion of safety. We spook easily and this paranoia is routinely manipulated by demagogues and multinational corporations.
That is more important, and more interesting, than whether George W. Bush is an empty-headed idiot or an evil genius operating on a plane far above nationalistic concerns. (Moore throws both ideas out there without bothering with their mutual exclusivity.)
Still, while Moore is neither a great director or a great thinker, he has managed to make a film that is tough and true — if not in the particulars, in its grave and profound progress. One suspects that, as a man, Michael Moore might not be as generous or as empathetic as George W. Bush, that he might possess the reflexive contempt for power of the nascent despot. But the foibles of the messenger ought not obscure his message.
In another movie, one that came out earlier this year, a character posed the existential question, “What is truth?” Whatever it is, it is likely not what our wishfulness proposes, not what our vanity demands, not what we so desperately want to believe.
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