Reviewed by PETER CALDER
Herald rating * * *
The most talked about film of the year arrives amid such anticipation that at the sold-out premiere screening in Auckland on Tuesday, it received an ovation before it started.
I was not a fan of Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, a generally clumsy and oafish piece of film-making which was smug, smartarsed and full of errors, omissions and manipulative juxtapositions. And the best that might be said of the new film is that it isn't as bad as some have said.
Moore's stated aim is to ensure George W. Bush doesn't get re-elected and, although I am not so naive as to think that reactionaries don't have agendas just because they don't declare them, it is sobering to imagine what Moore's constituency would say if a right-wing film-maker so openly targeted a Democrat President.
Still, the case he mounts is persuasive by its bulk: starting with the rigged election victory, he amasses evidence of Bush's laziness (he spent 42 per cent of his first eight months in office on holiday), executive mismanagement (he ignored pre-September 11 warnings of the terrorist threat), venality (the Bush family has tight ties to Saudis who control 7 per cent of the US economy) fecklessness (he sat, frozen to a schoolroom chair for nine minutes after hearing of the second strike on the World Trade Centre) and, most strikingly, the geopolitical fiction which underpins the senseless and criminal invasion of Iraq.
None of this is new: it's been widely canvassed in the mainstream media he so casually derides. Trotting out footage from the chauvinistic Fox News is a cheap way to impugn the integrity of the fourth estate, but Moore's camera spends a lot of time tracking over headlines from newspapers which have allegedly kept from us the truths he is unveiling.
Of course, his achievement in distilling the grim history of recent years into a watchable and entertaining film is not inconsiderable. But is it enough? The movie makes the interesting point about the way poor, mainly black people fight wars to protect the interests of rich, mainly white people, and elsewhere alludes to the way the manufactured climate of post-September 11 panic has consolidated the right-wing establishment's hold on power.
Again, there's not much here to surprise anyone who's heard of, say, Karl Marx or Noam Chomsky, though it's good those ideas get an outing in a film that will be widely seen. But there's a deeper problem: these are probably the most telling blows against Bush, since the panic-striking strategy will probably win him re-election, but Moore doesn't have the wit or the wisdom to keep punching.
The same scattershot sensibility we saw in Columbine is on display. Only in passing does he mention Dubya's anger that Saddam had "tried to kill my Dad". The Bible-belt fundamentalism that underpins the President's world view is ignored entirely.
Much of the film's length is devoted to jokey, self-congratulatory inserts - for example, Moore trying to get congressmen to enlist their kids. More shamefully, the man who likes to depict himself as a tormentor of elites and a friend of the little guy illustrates the membership of the coalition of the willing with demeaning ethnocentric portraits of the denizens of Palau or Iceland.
Telling and moving sequences shot (not by Moore) in Iraq depict the despair on both sides but the film is full of error and obfuscation. The September 11 commission, for example, reported that the FBI did interview and clear members of the bin Laden family and their flights did not leave the US while its airspace was closed. And anyone who thinks the Administration has banned pictures of GI's in body bags doesn't read the papers I do. But more interesting is the prevailing belief among Moore's supporters that his dishonesty is somehow excusable since he's on the side of the angels, and anyway the Other Side lies.
It's an argument that won't stand scrutiny. I despise George W. Bush as much as the next person, but being in the right doesn't entitle you to be wrong. In his hectoring and haranguing, Moore does not escape his duty to be accurate, particularly since he wants to change the leadership of the western world. For all its entertainment value, this film sets itself a challenge which it only occasionally manages to answer. It's fun all right, but that just ain't enough.
DIRECTOR: Michael Moore
RUNNING TIME: 121 minutes
RATING: M (content may disturb)
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts Rialto, previews this weekend, opens next Thursday
Fahrenheit 9/11
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