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In the Bush II years, the voice of dissent may have
disappeared from the campuses, the airwaves and other traditionally
contrary arenas of American life, but, as any regular patron of
film festivals will tell you, it's alive and well in the documentary
cinema.
A whole new genre of political documentary has developed over the
past four years, made up of films that are not typically left wing
or pro-anything but are consistently anti-globalization, anti-big
business, anti-big media and, above all, anti-Bush.
Until now, however, these films have preached to the converted in
the ghettos of film festivals, and only a handful -- "Super
Size Me," last week's "The Corporation," this week's
"Control Room" -- have made it to a small theatrical run.
This is why Michael Moore's savage new documentary, "Fahrenheit
9/11," is being regarded in so many quarters as an authentic
film event. It's poised to become the first of these new-wave, anti-establishment
films to jump out of the pack and shake up the American public in
a big way.
Indeed, buoyed by controversy (after its original distributor, Disney,
bailed on it) and the prestige of best-film honors at Cannes, it
could well become the docu-equivalent of "The Passion of the
Christ" and even affect the presidential election.
Just how good is it? Well, it's often scathingly funny; it does
a masterful job of ridiculing the personality, intellect and employment
resumé of George W. Bush, and many of its images and scenes
engender a gut-wrenching emotional impact.
And though writer-producer-director Moore narrates and imposes his
distinctive sensibility on every frame and puts himself front and
center as the star of several key sequences, it's much less of a
vanity production and ego trip than any of his previous films.
Even so, it's far from a documentary masterpiece, and its scatter-gun
collection of circumstantial evidence is not half as incendiary
an indictment of the New World Order as many of the other muckraking
films that have played the festival circuit in recent years.
Moore opens his film with what has become the "Rosebud"
of the new millennium anti-establishment: the contention that the
Bush administration is an illegal entity based on a stolen election
and deliberate voter fraud at the Florida polls in 2000.
From there, he makes the case that Bush did little in his first
nine months of office but take a record number of vacations, then
segues to 9/11 in a series of scenes that skillfully capture the
psychological impact of the tragedy without showing it.
In his film's strangest sequence, Moore then spends a great deal
of time studying Bush's non-reaction as he's told about the attack
while visiting a Florida schoolroom -- speculating on what the president
is thinking as he sits there in what appears to be impotent shock.
Moore believes the president's primary concern at this horrific
moment was the safety of his Saudi friends and allies, and goes
on to chronicle the mass evacuation he allowed of more than 20 members
of the bin Laden family from the United States that same day.
He also goes on to trace the Bush family's connection to the Saudis,
but -- though he interviews the author of the book, "House
of Bush, House of Saud" -- he offers only weak conjecture and
a lot of stock footage of the Bushes flanked by shady characters
in burnooses.
Moore does better in the next section, arguing that the administration,
aided by a dimwitted national media, has used 9/11 to create a national
paranoia and push through a Patriot Act that all but abrogates the
Constitution and basic civil rights.
As in his Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine," Moore
is at his devastating best in showing us how the media -- particularly
local television news -- is institutionally dedicated to scaring
us into embracing measures that are, at best, inconsistent, and,
at worst, sheer lunacy.
Toward this end, he interviews our own U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott and
contrasts images of manic airport-security searches with -- go figure
-- a 100-mile stretch of the Oregon Coast that's being watched over
by one lonely, unprepared state trooper.
Moore then concentrates on America's 9/11 non sequitur war with
Iraq, mostly in terms of images we didn't see on the network news:
dead babies, mutilated toddlers, wailing widows and the charred
remains of American bodies being desecrated by Iraqi mobs.
(The film debuted at Cannes before the Iraqi prisoner scandal hit,
and the word has been that Moore would update the film with some
of the Abu Ghraib material. But it didn't happen, and the film as
released in this country is actually five minutes shorter than the
Cannes version.)
For the most part, however, Moore shies away from the conduct of
the war, and only lightly touches on the embarrassing lack of weapons
of mass destruction and the damning testimony of Richard Clark --
in favor of repeat images that portray Bush as an arrogant simpleton.
In the last section, Moore focuses on the impact of the war on his
hometown of Flint, Mich., where Marine Corps recruiters all but
shanghai young minority members to be cannon fodder, and a mother
eloquently expresses her grief and outrage at losing a son in Iraq.
Though Moore mostly stays behind the camera, he does give us a few
of his trademark empty gestures: he reads the Patriot Act outside
the Capitol from the loudspeaker of an ice-cream wagon, and he ambushes
several congressmen with the request that they sign up their sons
for the war.
The sum of all this is moderately rousing and deliciously irreverent
in the Moore style, but not earthshaking as journalism, and devoid
of anything that the average person doesn't already know from reading
the newspaper.
On the other hand, Moore deserves a great deal of credit for manipulating
a media he believes is corrupt into shining a light on a message
that has been marginalized. Love him or hate him, he's a shrewd
showman and the populist Galahad of our time, and this is his moment.
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