Wired Mesh

The Passion of the Dubya

So it seems that I will be joining local autuer Jim Burer tonight at Pisa Pizza around 6 p.m. to co-moderate a discussion of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. It's the first in a series of film forums called Analyze This.

"The discussion will be focused on analyzing Michael Moore's techniques as a filmmaker and the tools he uses to communicate his ideas," Jim writes. This can be safely interpreted as a plea from Jim and I not to show up with political pamphlets. Don't make your local alt-weekly film critic sad. We're going to talk about mise-en-scene and other cool French words. It'll be fun.

Whether you can make it or not, enjoy my Pulse review of the Bush flick.

Michael Moore’s anti-Bush protest rally will entertain many and convince no one

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the June 30 issue of the Pulse

If Michael Moore is to be believed – and if there were ever a tenuous way to begin a review, there it is – I am the ideal audience for Fahrenheit 9/11: a steadfastly undecided voter, registered for the fall elections without any party affiliation, and harboring dark thoughts about President Bush ever since his Justice Department started targeting genial old hippies. Moore has said that he hopes above all that his movie will unceremoniously usher out the Bush administration by mobilizing the politically ambivalent. So it is my sad responsibility to inform him that, while he has crafted an awfully pleasurable two hours of fear and loathing in the District, a whiz-bang Power Point alleging abuses of power in every direction, he has left this voter absolutely immobilized.

David Edelstein has called Fahrenheit 9/11 “the liberals' The Passion of the Christ,” and that’s exactly right: both movies are evangelical tracts that are destined to attract wild popularity and convert no one. Mel Gibson lost his message of grace in a mire of blood and pain, while Moore’s new movie starts out with a sharp satirical edge, only to collapse under radical conspiracy theories. And both films suffer from a more fundamental common flaw: they’re both documents of a long-dead mentality. Gibson is happily ensconced in the Middle Ages, and Moore still parties like it’s 1969, convinced that the best response to jihadism, war and political division is an old-fashioned anti-war demonstration.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is less rollicking than Moore’s Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, and presumably more responsible in its fact-checking, but it ends up oddly less convincing. This is mainly because Moore is far too willing to engage in speculation over Bush’s personal ties to a trove of rich Saudis, particularly the bin Laden family. Note to Mike: if you’re going to mock George W. for doggedly pursuing a connection between Osama and Saddam (and there’s no shame in mocking that), it doesn’t help your case to argue for an even more unlikely connection between Osama and Bush. Moore’s obsession with a Bush-bin Laden link undermines what should be the best section of his movie, a sequence of stunning archival footage showing Bush, looking like a deer caught in some hideous headlights, reading the children’s book My Pet Goat to schoolchildren for a full seven minutes after he knows planes have crashed into the twin towers. This scene should stand on its own, portraying Bush as a lost clown of a Commander-in-Chief, but Moore has to clutter the scene with speculation that Bush was thinking of how to hide his contacts with the house of Saud. That’s not satire; it’s just silly.

Other more intentionally silly scenes work better, especially when Moore’s camera follows a pair of vapid Marine recruiters through a mall parking lot, or when he commandeers an ice cream truck to read the Patriot Act aloud to congressmen whom he suspects have overlooked its content. But toward its close, Fahrenheit 9/11 discovers real weight in the person of Lila Liscomb, a Flint, Michigan woman who travels to the White House after her soldier son is killed in Iraq. Her pain is undeniable, human, but Moore seems lost as to how he should handle something so delicate: when Liscomb wonders why her son was taken so young, all Moore can do is flash images of President Bush’s smirk, nearly shouting “ecce homo” at the audience.

And that’s where Fahrenheit 9/11 falls flat. It never failed to amuse and anger me, but in the face of real suffering, it flinches, only offering the bohemian canard that we must protest, protest, protest the bums in office. We live in ugly, complex times that impact the whole globe, bringing pain to all who seek peace, but Michael Moore still makes movies for an era when all troubles could be blamed on the thoroughgoing venality and corruption of the President. Somebody should tell him that the times, they are a-changing.

Posted by mesh at July 1, 2004 01:34 PM | TrackBack