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It's
the summer of 2004, and the United States seems to have crested
a grand new era for documentaries. From "Bowling for Columbine"
to "Capturing the Friedmans," from "Winged Migration"
to "Spellbound," the new millennium has witnessed
the expansion and wider acceptance of the genre.
No
summer blockbuster managed to generate the advance buzz of Michael
Moore's 2004 release (with some help from the grumpy, politicized
Europeans on the Cannes Festival jury, the cold feet of Disney,
who prohibited subsidiary Miramax from distributing the picture,
and a reported $10 million marketing budget-the biggest ever
for a documentary).
"Fahrenheit
9/11" opened with great fanfare across the U.S. on June
26, 2004. It grossed $8 million on opening night, and as I write
this, three nights later, news reports peg it as the number
one film in the country its first weekend. It broke the record
for biggest gross for a film opening on less than 1,000 screens
(the record holder was "Rocky"), and had a higher
per-screen take than "The Passion of the Christ" on
its opening weekend. It remains to be seen whether the initial
hue and cry of critics and commentators will inspire or sway
the average moviegoer, let alone the electorate. But to have
the country buzzing about truth or satire, accuracy or lies,
war or regime change (overseas or at home) instead of the latest
special effects extravaganza, leather-clad fantasy figure, wizard-in-training,
or J. Lo and Marc Anthony, is a welcome change from summers
past.
For
anyone who wasn't paying attention to the media blitz, Moore's
2004 film is about how the U.S., and in particular the Bush
Administration, reacted to 9/11, both at home and abroad. It
begins with a reverie about most of the major news networks
announcing Gore as the winner in Florida, the candidate and
supporters celebrating that victory . . . and then the cold
light of dawn and possible trickery. Moore recounts young W's
history as a failing businessman whose friends regularly awarded
him more money and board seats, and the Bush family's historic
connections to Saudi oil money and the bin Laden family, then
ranges across the diversion in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq,
the hideous ironies of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act.
The
genial but relentless filmmaker returns once more to one of
the ongoing characters in his films—his
home town of Flint, Michigan—to
illustrate how working class, middle America has sacrificed
its sons (and increasingly, daughters) to overseas wars that
have enriched companies like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group,
both because the have-nots are patriotic and because hard economic
times make military service a terrific job option . . . at least
initially.
True,
most of the specific charges and larger questions raised in
Moore's film are not new, or particularly striking, but to harp
on that as Christopher Hitchens and others have done, is to
miss much of the point. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a film;
it's a satire, a polemic, an entertainment, and an (ungainly)
work of art. To note that it's biased, clumsy, self-contradictory,
occasionally adolescent or vicious, is not enough to diminish
its signal achievement. Longtime activists and political analysts
can quibble at length, but Moore seeks to galvanize the American
electorate—the
liberals who have felt isolated and overwhelmed, sure, but even
more the middle-of-the-roaders who would feel betrayed if they
really understood what the Bush Administration has been doing.
The movie has a mission and makes no secret of its political
aims, but it's also quite funny, quietly astonishing, and genuinely
moving.
Calmly,
respectfully, with a Marine veteran in dress uniform at his
side, Moore stands outside the U.S. Capitol trying to get Congressmen
to enlist their kids in the military to fight in Iraq. The look
one representative gives him is priceless; others hustle away
like cockroaches fleeing a light. There are plenty of familiar
shots of Bush teeing off or missing a shot on a hunt. Only weeks
before 9-11 (at a time when Attorney General Ashcroft was telling
the FBI not to bother him with any more reports about potential
terrorist activity), the President hangs out on his Texas ranch
and talks to the press about armadillos.
Some
of the sillier material—Oregon
State Troopers wearily describing their lack of staff and funding,
and puzzlement over how to protect America's borders; citizens
of tiny Tappahannock, Virginia trying to figure out why they
received reports of an impending terrorist attack ("We
have a Wal-Mart"); a cookie-munching California peace group
infiltrated by a sheriff's deputy; and an elderly gentleman
ratted to the FBI by fellow health club members for criticizing
the President and the war—seem
too slight to merit the time wasted on them, but their gentle
humor may appeal to the political fence-sitters in the audience.
The
most celebrated find of this movie is a video of the President
shot by an elementary school teacher at a Florida class he was
visiting when the twin towers were hit. We see an aide inform
Bush of the second plane's impact. For a full seven minutes
(mercifully edited down), the President continues to sit there
with odd, distant, puzzled looks on his face while the children
read the book My Pet Goat. He seems to be waiting for somebody
to tell him what to do. The effect is quietly frightening.
But
there are many other startling items. Bing Crosby sings "Santa
Claus is Coming to Town" as American soldiers head out
on patrol in Baghdad on Christmas Eve. (The music was not Moore's
fiendish choice; a boom box was playing it at the soldiers'
station next to a makeshift Christmas tree.) The film briefly
shows us ghastly wounds and atrocities that didn't come over
the networks; a distant, very public beheading in Saudi Arabia;
footage of a solitary, youthful George Bush driving a car across
the Texas prairie; Ashcroft crooning a patriotic song he composed
himself. Audiences have made some of the most audible sounds
of disgust watching Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
groom himself for the press by running his comb through his
mouth before pushing it through his hair, then licking more
saliva onto his hand to smooth his coif.
Viewers
will be surprised by newsworthy footage that took place in the
U.S. but they never saw or heard about: an egg pelting the Presidential
limousine along with a protest so large and vehement that Bush
was rushed up Pennsylvania Avenue to his inauguration, unlike
the leisurely open-air stroll many of his predecessors enjoyed.
The procession of U.S. Representatives who sought to debate
the Florida election irregularities in Congress when it came
time to ratify Bush's election, but couldn't get a hearing because
not a single Senator would sign on. (It's particularly puzzling,
even painful, to see the President of the Senate, Al Gore, repeatedly
rapping the gavel and telling the visiting Congresspersons—most
of them female and black—to
sit down and shut up because the rules won't allow a debate.)
If you weren't glued to C-SPAN, you probably never saw this
before, and had already given up on the Florida debacle by then.
Why did Gore and the Democrats lie down and let the Bush machine
roll over them, one has to wonder.
Moore's
handling of the 9/11 attack is uncharacteristically subtle and
classy. We know the sights only too well, so he gives us a black
screen and just the sounds of the attack and confusion, then
footage of people looking skyward and consoling one another,
and finally a desolation of dust clouds and flying papers.
Like
"The Fog of War," this film has tended to divide critics
into two camps: film reviewers (Ebert, Denby, Travers, Hoberman,
etc.) who mostly admire it, and political commentators who have
taken it too seriously and found it wanting as a work of intellectual
analysis. (The choleric Hitchens, in Slate magazine, is perhaps
the best example: he called the film "dishonest,"
"demogogic," "a piece of crap," "a
spectacle of abject moral cowardice," and so on.)
In
their haste to attack Moore as a theorist, however, his critics
almost invariably make errors of their own. Hitchens, for example,
charges that Moore asserts that Saddam's Iraq, "had never
attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American."
Since I read the Hitchens piece before I saw the movie, I waited
for the passage; as I heard it, Moore says Iraq never attacked
or threatened "America" or killed an American, which
is different from what Hitchens charges. James Berardinelli's
carping review at ReelViews says Moore uses music from "The
Magnificent Seven" to spoof the Bush Administration, but
the visuals and music are clearly from the TV show "Bonanza."
(Which probably says something about Berardinelli's age.)
More
important, however, is that Moore has chosen to fight fire (the
lies of the Bush Administration and conservative talk radio)
with fire. I don't think anyone could argue the filmmaker's
shadings of truth or inaccuracies are anywhere in a league with
those of his political foes, either for size or import. The
millions upon millions of dollars that campaign organizations
raise every election year do not go toward helping the informed
and active citizen make up his or her mind, but to swaying the
millions of couch potatoes who get their news from Fox, TV headlines,
and their neighbors, rather than investigating the issues and
candidates more thoroughly for themselves, and who often feel
as inspired to skip the voting booth as to exercise a right
people across much of the rest of the globe can only wish they
had. Those are the folks Moore's out to ignite, not his "intellectual
betters."
I
am finishing this piece on the evening Monday, June 28, 2004.
Tonight Moore participated in a nationwide Internet and speaker
phone chat (actually, two; one for the convenience of each coast)
sponsored by MoveOn.org, in an attempt to galvanize strong audience
reactions to his film in favor of political action. Time will
tell whether the energy generated by his film's opening and
events like this will be harnessed or will dissipate, but it's
clear Moore has made some sort of cinematic history, and whether
Bush wins or loses in the fall, Moore can claim some credit
not only for a milestone in documentary history, but American
history itself.
No
small achievement for "just a regular guy from Flint, Michigan."
David
Loftus
dloft59@earthlink.net
-------------------------
David
Loftus, a lifelong Democrat, is accustomed to voting for losers:
the election of 1992 was the only time his guy won, and Loftus
was still voting mostly against the other guy. When the incumbent
was up for reelection, Loftus voted in disgust for the Socialist
candidate—before
Lewinsky and Starr. The reviewer is quietly proud that his town
of residence, Portland, had the largest number of MoveOn participants
in the country, and that his particular "house party"
(more than 800 at Portland State University) was bigger than
cumulative totals for most other states in the union. Maybe
his vote will go to another winner this year—although
once again he'll mainly be voting against somebody else. David
Loftus, Writer - AllWatchers.com
Credits
Michael
Moore - Writer, Producer, Director
Jim Czarnecki, Kathleen Glynn - Producers
Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, Agnew Mentre - Executive Producers
Kurt Engfehr, Christopher Seward, T. Woody Richman - Editors
Mike Desjarlais - Camera
Jeff Gibbs - Music
2004,
112 minutes
Awards
2004
Golden Palm and Fipresci Prize, Cannes Film Festival
Official Site
http://www.fahrenheit911.com/
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