The un-making of the president, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
IFC and Lions Gate Films present a Michael Moore film, starring Moore. Written by Moore. 112 minutes. Rated R for language and violence (including a beheading).

3.5 stars

While Michael Moore has been accused of a great many things, he’s never obscured his dislike for the current political administration.

In these months preceding the national elections, Moore has again turned himself into America’s simultaneously most loved and hated P.T. Barnum in an effort to hawk a film that dismantles the Bush/Cheney regime currently in power.

Long gone is the anonymous resident of Flint, Mich. who set out to make a little film about the evil empire - General Motors - in 1989. Also gone too is the bastion of the middle-class who rallied against corporate “downsizing” and the loss of American jobs for 1997’s “The Big One.”

Those fellows have been replaced with an upgraded Moore - a version 2.0 if you will - that enjoys all the privileges of an upper class lifestyle but still dresses like a slob to show loyalty to his roots. He’s gone from running around Flint, or Rockford, or Dick Clark’s minivan - as he did in 2002’s “Bowling For Columbine” - to scoring points in sardonic narration in his latest “docu-dramedy,” which opened last Friday in 850 theaters.

This newer version of Moore is much more vengeful than the one in “Columbine,” and his attack seems at times as unfocused as shooting fish in a barrel. Although he considers himself a documentarian when it suits him and a comedian when he’s attacked on the veracity of his movies’ facts, he doesn’t purport to be “fair and balanced” about the Bush empire. Moore will tell you: He wants his film to catalyze Americans into voting for the other guy - whether that be Sen. John Kerry, Ralph Nader or any of the other presidential hopefuls that aren’t Bush.

So why is a movie like “Fahrenheit 9/11” - this lopsided, venomous attack on our president - something of considerable merit? The answer comes not in the pile of documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, but when Moore remembers why audiences salivated over his movie like Pavlovian dogs in the first place. With his sweatshirt-and-ballcap-wearing attitude, Moore has been able to look behind the curtain and unmask individuals.

When he captures stalwarts of the entertainment and business worlds - like Charlton Heston in “Columbine” and Phil Knight in “The Big One” - saying things they probably shouldn’t have on camera, we cheer his audacity. But we’re touched more when he comforts the principal at school where there’s been a school shooting, or a woman who was just “downsized” out of her longtime job.

His success in “Fahrenheit 9/11” rests primarily on the shoulders of Flint native Lila Lipscomb, whose 26-year-old son died in Iraq in early April. Lipscomb is a true patriot, one Moore suggests has been won over by the anti-Iraq propaganda campaign that the Bush administration created to justify war. But as word from her son becomes increasingly more negative about the reasons for his deployment, Lipscomb finds herself in a precarious position.

After news comes of his passing, Lipscomb cannot find an outlet to express her frustrations with the situation until a visit to Washington, D.C. Outside the White House, she finds a certain solace - and a direction to expel her anger over losing a son.
Moore’s cleverness is that he transitions from point to point almost seamlessly. When the film opens, he asks us to imagine the possibility of Al Gore winning the hotly contested 2000 election and shows us the horror of disenfranchised black representatives from Florida needing one senator’s signature to contest the election results. Except there’s one problem - the senators are all noticeably absent. In an ironic turn, Gore’s strict following of the rules and regulations as chairman blocks any effort to install him as president.

Just as the senators liked to vacation at inopportune moments, Moore says, so too does our president. Spliced in are clips of Bush out on the golf course, or hunting armadillos with his Scottish terrier, Barney. The documentarian theorizes that it was Bush’s willingness to vacation 42 percent of the time before Sept. 11 that left our fair nation woefully unprepared for the attacks.

If “Fahrenheit 9/11” has one lacking element when compared to “Columbine,” it’s that Moore isn’t asking his viewers for any input. He’s indoctrinating them, telling them that its the Bush family’s long relationship with both the Saudis and the Carlyle Group that allowed them to not only protect the family of known terrorist Osama bin Laden in the days following Sept. 11 but also to profit from not one, but two, wars.

But Moore’s points backfire when he takes his notorious pot shots at the presidency, such as showing a clip of entertainer Britney Spears telling an interviewer that Americans should blindly follow presidential directives because she trusts Bush. Moore has also included several shots of Bush looking confused, making inappropriate statements during otherwise serious events, and stumbling over his own words. But these clips will hardly gain Moore the voter base that he claims to be searching for by releasing this film. The voters who elected Bush in 2000 knew all about his propensity to foul up speeches and his off-the-cuff manner.

But that was a selling point for Bush. When Gore could pronounce the names of exiled Yugoslavian leaders in pre-election debates, some Americans resented the pretension of a candidate with a “holier than thou” attitude. Moore’s documentary serves to remind people of the Bush we’ve come to accept, even when he threatens to embarrass us all in a very public fashion.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” has been over-hyped by a media driven to stir any pot of controversy and a few token Republicans who acted like outraged Christians during “The Last Temptation of Christ” or Jewish leaders during “The Passion of the Christ” by condemning the movie before even seeing it.

As a pitch-man by trade, Moore has embraced the controversy all the way to the bank. The movie is manipulative, yes, but that doesn’t negate it’s importance. We have an important decision to make come November and Moore’s film is just one more piece in the puzzle of helping us all figure it out. He’s just hoping that after citizens flock to movie theaters for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” there’s more states that come up blue than red this Election Day.