Starring: Michael Moore (II), George W. Bush

4 out of 10 stars

At the end of Michael Moore's new propaganda piece, Palme d'Or winner Fahrenheit 9/11, he shows George W. Bush mangling the famous adage, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

That certainly should apply to anyone's approach to a Michael Moore film.

What's true, what's sort-of-true, and what's false? It's hard to say (though please see Christopher Hitchin's take on the film in Slate). The new, frequently flippant work by the left's Rush Limbaugh is not nearly the heavily fictionalized work that Bowling for Columbine turned out to be (and so obviously was on first viewing), but it is the immediate successor to JFK. 9/11 is largely a conspiracy theorist's fever dream that proves valuable because of its very existence, but is a liability in the name of careful documentary filmmaking or as a political tool for liberals.

Much like Oliver Stone's still-gorgeous Kennedy film, Moore is brilliant with his use of images. He's even more brilliant about what he doesn't show. At the beginning of the film he recounts the tumultuous, heavily contested national election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The way Moore presents it, it was a landslide for Al Gore with—wait!--the state of Florida somehow stealing the election away, as if no other states went to Bush, omitting things like Gore's loss in Tennessee, his home state or Bush's narrow loss in New Mexico (by fewer votes than in Florida). No, in Moore-land, it was a landslide and the first news outlet to break the story, FOX, was so powerful the other networks had to follow.

Moore then moves on to the post-election process and Bush's swearing-in, where his motorcade was pelted with eggs. "No president ever witnessed such a day" solemnly intones Moore. Uh, didn't the South secede from the Union as a consequence of Lincoln's election?

Moore doesn't have time for those kinds of subtleties. He has to rush on to September 11th. Except Michael does one very smart thing in this movie about painful and shocking images (such as dead and wounded children): he doesn't show the airplanes hitting the Twin Towers. He blacks the screen out and only has the sounds. Then he shows the dumbfounded and aghast onlookers, and those who lost loved ones making their pleas to the camera. Why the omission? The visual of the impact was omitted because it would remind people in the most immediate sense that we were attacked, that innocent Americans jumped to their deaths rather than burn and that it was an act of war. After September 11th, we were at war. It would have set up a tone of opposition that Moore absolutely had to avoid in his attempt to build his case. He later shows painful and devastating images of children and civilians killed or maimed in Iraq (we're led to believe) but he doesn't show anything from Afghanistan (where he claims we only sent a handful of troops, implying the opposite -- that we should have sent more and killed more?). Surely, in our effort to strike back at Al Qaeda we did the same thing to women and children in Afghanistan. Isn't the overall moral point that war is bad? Moore concedes that ground early.

Regardless, seeing the dead and wounded Iraqis is the one segment in the film that is powerful and important. It's the one you want Moore to get away from, but the ONLY reason to see this movie, and, regardless of your political affiliation, the reason you probably must see this movie (with the unfortunate side-effect of making Moore an even wealthier man).

If you're on the left, and felt that not only was the war with Iraq unjustified, but all war unjustified, it will make you burn with anger (though why you're not burning with anger about the dead children in Afghanistan, or Bosnia, where we performed imprecise air strikes, is my question). If you're on the right and supported Bush, it is required to see what you signed up for. War is amputated arms and dead children and images that don't go well with people's weekday, 6:00 dinner. It's important to look at those images and recognize the impact of that decision.

It's also important to recognize how important it is that this movie exists at all. America is about the dissenting opinion being heard, even if that dissenting opinion is half-fabricated. It's a symbol of what America's Constitution means, that there is a marketplace of ideas where a "documentary" filmmaker can call the most powerful man in the world a fraud on a worldwide telecast, the second most-watched event of the year, and then become fabulously wealthy by creating films attacking the administration in power. (By the way, anyone who believes that the sequel to the most profitable "documentary" film of all time (Columbine) was going to have a tough time getting distributed hasn't seen the shit that sells at Sundance, bought by a lot of the same guys distributing this. This was a no-brainer.) In a meta-sense Palme d'Or winner Fahrenheit 9/11 is the most important film of the year and Moore a symbol of our innate strength and ability to deal with criticisms from within.

And criticize he does. Moore's case seems to be; it's Bush's fault. All of it. Well, more like it's Bush's fault as he's the evil puppet of corporate America and its machine of greed. Moore's mythos includes the shady ties of the powerful, and suspect, Bush family with the Carlyle Group, and its ties to Osama Bin Laden. My God, this is explosive. Bush, and his military complex cronies stood to profit from a terrorist attack, just like in The Long Kiss Goodnight! Moore must be poised to continue this blistering expose with further facts and revelations! But, instead of pursuing this incendiary indictment Moore then trains his ever-faithful camera on the Oregon coast (?) and his old stand-by, Flint, Michigan.

What's most shocking about Palme d'Or winner, Fahrenheit 9/11 is what, in long stretches, a truly crappy documentary it is. As if unable to actually get his lead dog to hunt, Moore focuses on the little people, something he only seems able to do with elitist pity.

In the first segment, Moore discusses the vast and open coastline of unpatrolled Oregon -- versus the vast and largely open border of Canada, where a number of the 9/11 terrorists entered the U.S., including the Millennium Plot bomber, who was heading to L.A.X. -- and it's such a flaccid and silly segment one wonders if it just isn't filler. Moore's saying we need more patrols there? But, wait, in this segment, he's decrying the ridiculous and invasive techniques of those assigned to actually check people heading onto airplanes. What? Huh?

And what would a Michael Moore flick be without his own Clint Howard, Flint, Michigan. Ah, Flint, blighted by corporate greed and lack of economic incentives (is Moore's production company based in Flint? Nah!), we once again drive by your decaying ramblers as Michael deigns to place his mike in front of the tattooed trailer trash. It's not as clinically weak as the Oregon segment but it's still cutting-room floor material. We follow two recruiters as they try to entice young men and women to enter the military! And it's on tape! They even hand out brochures! Those bastards! One can see here just how and why Quentin Tarantino and his Cannes crew judged it to be on par with Taxi Driver and La Dolce Vita.

Moore's also caught in the desperate act of trying to "support the troops" when his real stance is intellectual contempt, if not profound disgust. In his view, the military is made up of the poor and uneducated, pressed into service by being nearly conked on the head and dragged from the mall to posts overseas. Once there, these deluded youths put on their metal music and blow the heads off innocent women and children. Moore shows a Christmas Eve raid of an Iraqi home as indicative of our inability to win over the hearts and minds, though he gives no context for the raid or the person taken into custody (much like Limbaugh, Moore's not big on context).

Moore makes Bush out to be a complete buffoon and implies that his motives (and the motives of those controlling him) are driven purely by their desire for profit. Moore stretches to such lengths to prove this point that the question arises, if getting richer was the Administration's only goal why, on September 12th didn't Bush and Co. say, "15 of the 19 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden came from Saudi Arabia. I have proof of widespread terrorist activity in the nation and thus, we must end this oppressive regime?" Given Moore's own conjecture about the Bush's clandestine ties and their obvious sociopathic approach, in this scenario Bush and Co. clear out their messy ties with the Saudis, remove a much weaker military complex, and gain the #1 oil producing-nation in the world. Why didn't the amoral greed heads do that?

Additionally, Moore makes much of the military lives lost in Iraq but never mentions that, in theory, we didn't need to land a single troop. As so many right-wing nuts have mentioned, we could have turned Iraq into a sheet of glass and never had an American put a foot on the soil. We certainly didn't in Bosnia. No, it was precisely because we were trying to mitigate the amount of civilians killed that young American men and women are dying. Moore skirts issues such as this, even though they're the logical results of a lot of his hypothesis, because they don't fit in with his conclusions.

This movie's timing, agenda, and its enormous failings are absolutely the best thing that could have happened to the Bush campaign. It reminds everyone of ugly facts like the poor post-war planning, the very scary nature of the Patriot Act (sunshine clause or no), profiteering and excesses of Halliburton, Enron, and the Carlyle Group but then, because they're all trashed in with the rest of the hyperbole, bathos, and Jim Garrison conspiracy theories, it all turns into a diatribe trough, full of an undistinguishable mash.