The third degree
Moore's anti-Bush outrage fuels his riveting 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff | June 23, 2004
For my money, the key scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- the moment on which Michael Moore's blistering yet frustratingly blunt object of a movie hinges -- is when President Bush first hears that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center and that the United States is under attack. He was at a photo op in Florida, remember, reading "My Pet Goat" to a schoolroom full of children, and his expression of pole-axed confusion is by now a matter of public iconography.
But Moore got his hands on all the footage, and he time-lapses us through the entire seven minutes that the president sat in that classroom and, knowing terrorists were using passenger planes as missiles on innocent Americans, stared like a stuffed deer into space. We've recently learned that this was around the time Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering fighter planes to shoot down the hijacked jets and our government's emergency-response mechanisms were convulsing with chaos. You look at Bush, whose circuitry seems quite simply to have overloaded, and think, "This is the leader of the free world?"
Moral scorn can be a beautiful thing. Beautifully patriotic, too -- one thinks of Joseph Welch asking Senator Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" And for many people who are deeply unhappy with the current administration and the war it has chosen to wage, the wish for someone to come along and articulate that scorn has acquired desperate proportions.
Of such things are 15-minute standing ovations and top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival made, as well as cheering premieres in New York and Los Angeles. "Fahrenheit 9/11," which opens to-day in New York and locally on Friday, has been so feverishly anticipated, in fact, that some audiences will be willing to ignore the film's lapses, the better to embrace its energizing rhetoric. That would be a mistake. "Fahrenheit" is worth the wait, but it should come with a label: "Chew before Swallowing." There are no new smoking guns here. Instead, Moore gives us the case against George W. Bush, a fat compendium of previously reported crimes, errors, sins, and grievances delivered in the director's patented tone of vaudevillian social outrage. And it works for much of the film; indeed, the first two-thirds of "Fahrenheit" are chunky with damning information and imagery.
Moore ice-skates quickly but vividly over the 2000 Florida vote debacle and the placement of Bush relations, appointees, and sympathizers in crucial posts, from Fox News to the Supreme Court. He distills much of the information in such books as Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud" and Richard A. Clarke's "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" and presents it to the non-reading public with bitter wit and an eye for the telling visual.
It's one thing, for instance, to read about the administration's attempts to hush up the Bush family's longstanding ties to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and quite another to see two versions of George W. Bush's military records, the uncensored one providing the name of the fellow reservist and Texas money manager who allegedly funneled bin Laden family funds into Bush's businesses and political campaigns.
Moore also pauses to ridicule, and "Fahrenheit 9/11" is rich with the mockery of powerful people shooting themselves in the foot. The media and celebrities come in for lumps -- there's a drive-by sound bite from Britney Spears that will destroy any remaining sympathy you might have for the singer -- but Bush and his pals are Moore's prime targets, from John Ashcroft unctuously crooning the self-penned "Let the Eagle Soar" to Paul Wolfowitz spitting on his comb before running it through his hair prior to an interview.
As amusing as this is, it's awfully easy stuff. With the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Moore has to get down to business, and he knows it. He conveys the tragedy itself with remarkable (for him) understatement, leaving the screen black and letting the soundtrack pull us back. He caustically details the administration's manipulation of public fear and spends necessary time on the Orwellian implications of the Patriot Act. (Since no one on Capitol Hill seems to have actually read the act, Moore hires an ice cream truck to drive around Washington while he reads the bill over the loudspeaker.)
There comes a point in any Michael Moore movie, though, where the filmmaker crosses the line from populism into shamelessness. In "Bowling for Columbine," it was when he left the photo of a Columbine victim on then NRA president Charlton Heston's doorstep. In "Fahrenheit 9/11," that moment comes when Moore goes back to his hometown of Flint, Mich., and focuses on Lila Lipscomb, a lower-middle-class mother of a US soldier in Iraq.
Already the movie's treatment of the war has blown hot and cold. Moore gets the comedy of Army recruiters trolling shopping mall parking lots for fresh meat, and the tragedy of the Bush administration's proposed cuts in military pay and benefits. Footage of atrocities and abuses similar to those at Abu Ghraib prison are here and terrible to see. At the same time, one tiny sentence about Saddam Hussein's crimes against his own people might have gone a long way to silence Moore's critics.
With the death of Lipscomb's son in Iraq, Moore himself turns exploiter. Her grief, of course, is genuine. So is our response to it. But when Moore prompts her to read her son's final letter out loud, and she cries helplessly as she does so, it becomes clear that the filmmaker's intrusiveness knows no bounds, and that he would sacrifice the dignity of even his beloved Flintians for political theater.
For all that, "Fahrenheit 9/11" remains the summer's must-see. Not because Disney tried to censor it; please, the film studio told its Miramax subsidiary it wouldn't distribute the film well over a year ago, and the recent mini-scandal is both pure PR and exactly what Moore and the Weinstein brothers should have done to get the movie to as many people as possible.
No, "Fahrenheit" should be seen because it takes off the gloves and wades into the fray, because it synthesizes the anti-Bush argument like no other work before it, and because it forces you to decide for yourself exactly where passion starts to warp point of view.
One last thought: "Fahrenheit 9/11" is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary. To do so abuses the word and shames the good and balanced work done by filmmakers as storied as D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple, as current as Jehane Noujaim of "Control Room," and as hard-working and unheralded as Carma Hinton of Brookline's Long Bow Group.
Moore, by contrast, is a maker of agit-entertainment, of cinematic essays whose express purpose is to convince. That's fine as long as he's respecting his audience. But when he pushes the camera into Lipscomb's weeping face and keeps it there, he's saying that he doesn't trust you to think for yourself. And that is when he becomes his enemy.
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