Toward the end of Michael Moore's new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, the filmmaker engages in one of his trademark bits, the attention-grabbing, comedic stunts for which he's known and in some circles, vilified. Noting that only one member of Congress has a son or daughter currently serving in the U.S. armed forces, Moore heads to Capitol Hill with a stack of military sign-up papers to try to convince others in Congress to enlist their children for service. Of course, no parent can sign away their adult child to the U.S. military, so even if one of the politicians Moore accosts wanted to submit to his request, it would be impossible.
These sorts of bits, in which Moore points out a problem by attacking people who can in no way properly respond to him nor solve the problem he's outlined, are why Moore is so easily discredited by conservatives as an spotlight-hungry, mean-spirited charlatan.
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Fahrenheit 9/11 is one of the most hottly anticipated movies of the year, in large part thanks to director Michael Moore's complaining that Disney was refusing to distribute it through Miramax (Disney said Moore had known this for year). Whether it's the case that a conservative company got cold feet or that a loose-with-the-facts filmmaker created a publicity stunt, Fahrenheit is sure to ignite lively debates in cafes and bars coast to coast. Here are some other documentaries that will do the same.
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Thankfully, the rest of Fahrenheit 9/11 is free of these sorts of stunts, and is actually remarkably straightforward and somber for the man who once hounded General Motors CEO Roger Smith (in his 1989 debut feature, Roger & Me) and invaded Charlton Heston's home to get the aging NRA president to talk about gun control (in 2002's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine). In Fahrenheit, Moore accosts no one except Congress, barges into no offices and doesn't conduct a single confrontational interview. He doesn't even appear on camera for much of the two-hour film, a marked contrast to his famous bespectacled, baseball-capped presence in his other films.
Instead, Moore uses more traditional documentary techniques to lay out his case against George W. Bush and the Iraq war, including archival video footage, voice-over narration, basic talking-head interviews and newspaper and government document clips. Though Moore provides the narration himself, his familiar sarcasm is also surprisingly muted. He still manages to get in jokes about Britney Spears and Ricky Martin, and a sequence that puts the faces of the Bush administration onto cowboys in a parody of the opening credits of a western movie.
Otherwise, Moore presents his arguments using a series of facts, first drawing connections between Bush, his business associates and the bin Laden family, and then making a more emotionally affecting case against sending American soldiers to Iraq, and against the killing of Iraqis. If you aren't a Moore fan, Fahrenheit probably isn't going to convince you to support him, and despite its restraint, it still has many of the flaws Moore-haters tend to focus on.
Aside from the sometimes off-putting sarcasm and jokiness, perhaps Fahrenheit's biggest flaw is the way it confuses correlative with causative relationships in its condemnation of Bush and his associates. Moore has very convincing facts to build up the connections between the business interests of the wealthy bin Laden family and those of Bush's allies, including his former president father, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of State James Baker. He shows that the bin Ladens were flown out of the U.S. only days after the 9/11 attacks, and that both the bin Ladens and Bush associates stand to gain from business opportunities following the war in Iraq.
While these events are clearly related, and at the very least are highly uncomfortable, neither Moore nor anyone in his audience can say with certainty that these relationships caused terrorist attacks or wars, and indeed whether anything would be different if those relationships did not exist. Moore never states those accusations, but he clearly hopes his viewers will make them by implication, and that's a leap his facts don't support.
There are other elements in the film to take issue with, as well: Moore's extensive portrayal of a woman from his hometown of Flint, Michigan, whose son died in Iraq borders on exploitive, especially when Moore shows her reading her son's final letter before his death, fighting back tears. It also serves to bring home his point far better than any declassified documents or interviews with anti-Bush figures ever could. Graphic portrayals of the aftermath of violence in Iraq, including bloodied children and women with faces covered in napalm, are also hard to take but nonetheless extraordinarily effective in making his case that war is hell.
In the end, Moore may simply be preaching to the choir, but he's a mighty good preacher. Whether Fahrenheit deserved the Palme d'Or at Cannes is debatable, since it's not a particularly outstanding or innovative piece of filmmaking. It is, however, a damn good argument, backed up with solid research and told in a plain-spoken but non-patronizing way. Those who blast Moore for being biased have utterly missed the point: his bias is his reason for existence, for making films. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a reasoned and effective presentation of that bias, the filmic version of a well-argued, impassioned opinion column.