Was It All a Dream?
Fahrenheit 9/11, the new documentary by Michael Moore, begins with a scene that is likely to take the breath away from any American liberal. Not the bombings in Iraq, not the Pentagon attack, but instead Al Gore celebrating victory in Florida back in 2000.
It plays out as a dream, and you want to believe for a moment that none of it every happened – no Patriot Act, no Iraq war, no trillions of dollars in top-tier tax cuts, no Halliburton, no Bush. You want to believe that scene – Al Gore, with Ben Affleck and Robert De Niro cheering him on in the background as he thanked Florida for their votes – is actually true, that he would go and get the electoral votes and we can do it all over again. But we can't.
Allan Ball aside, there's nothing to ruin an arts career more than going from your first major success straight into television, and I think nobody has suffered worse than Michael Moore over the past several years. The amazing, personal vision shown in "Roger and Me" was followed up with two television shows, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." Both shows were exercises in self-promoting sketch comedy which made Saturday Night Live seem like a meditation in humility. Every skit was Moore berating a lower-level manager with some sort of cheap comic set piece. This "look-at-me" mentality coupled with TV's need to short attention-reducing comedy gags lurked in the background of "Bowling for Columbine" – the movie often felt like a series of TV sketches strung together by a very loose thread.
So it's good to know that Moore has once again returned to full form with Farhenheit 9/11. No matter what you think about the President, or the War in Iraq, or Moore himself, this is a movie that should be seen. Moore has grown by leaps and bounds, and he has assembled a movie that, even if you find it flawed or outright wrong, will leave you unsettled with some horrific images of what is going on in the background of our country.
He Finally Knows what He Should and Shouldn't Be Doing.
Stylistically Moore has never been more aware of his strengths and weakness. I think he knows that the "let's do a pratical joke!" style of ambush journalism, while a perfect match for television, is getting old, and definitely not appropriate for the subject matter of this movie. When it does show up, which it does twice, it's under a minute and feels like it was thrown in just to appease the fan base. The music has also become more scene specific and are a perfect match. "Vacation" by the Go-Gos plays over Bush's endless vacations pre-Sept 11th and itmake the montage. Bush seems like a 13-year old girl having the time of her life during her junior high summer vacation instead of the most important person in the world.. The theme from the "Greatest American Hero" ('Believe it or Not') gives the aircraft carrier landing Bush did an extra layer of surreality and fakeness – it's even more like a child dreaming of becoming a comic book hero now.
And the bad choices are left out. Something like "What a Wonderful World" ending with the second plane hitting the second tower, one of the cheapest and offensive parts of Bowling for Columbine, is nowhere to be found here. In fact, the scenes of the tower crashes will numb you. In a scene which proves that you need to see movies in a theater to get the full experience, the screen goes black and all you hear are screamings and sirens. At home on a TV screen, it would be a nothing experience – "hey look the screens dark." In the theater, you feel as if it's happening all over again. Everything goes black, and the sound of the terror surrounds you. It feel like something is genuinely wrong all over again, at that very moment.
Moore's voice is his strongest weapon here. It can go from projecting a slight sense of dread while talking about complex business relations between the Bush family and prominent Saudis to extreme compassion while interviewing people who have lost loved ones to Iraq, to snide sarcasm while condescending to members of Congress. He also leaves a lot of voice for other people. Much of the footage is archival: news broadcasts, newspaper columns, press conferences, and the President speaking.
It's clear that this is intended to do end run past complaints that he is lying or biased – and it helps, though it doesn't work entirely by itself. But whether or not Moore is completely objective is besides the point.
Unbalanced? Maybe More Like Counter-Balance
Sure there are all the normal complaints. People have this quaint, but naive, view on how objectivity should work in a documentary. People who make documentaries are not journalists. There needs to be no "equal time" to make for an excellent documentary. That said, there needs to be a consideration of the alternative, if only to discredit it properly. Moore has said publically (though not in the movie) that this movie is so slanted as a counter-balance to the media not doing it's job over the past 4 years. I'm willing to give him this. Sure, in 20 years it may look like yet more rabid propaganda, but to see rows and rows of amputeed American soldiers in a failing Veteran's hospital, while the media isn't fighting to show the caskets of American's wartime dead, is a completely shocking experience, one you can't find in major American news.
Another major complaint is that Moore's conspiracy theories having holes in them. The first third of the movie is spent laying out connections between the Bushes and various Saudi oil tycoons, including the Bin Ladens. Many people are criticizing the movie for not having a full proof explaination for a quid pro quo tradeoff.
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There isn't one, and Moore does want any prosecutor does when there is no smoking gun – he piles on loads and loads of circumstantial evidence. Tons of it. And though you don't leave thinking that any specific action was taken on behalf of the Sauds, you leave thinking that they played a major part in the process of our government's thoughts. One might even say an inappropriate part.
Still there could have been more at some points. The examples of the excesses of the Patriot Act have nothing really to do with the Patriot Act itself – there's no mention of secret trials, or seizing medical records, or Ashcroft doing jumping-jacks on behalf of the gun lobby. We could have seen more on how Halliburton came to the place of power that they are now, and how a former Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney began the wheels of making our military dependent on this private corporation to operate.
All in all, it's something that needs to be seen. I think the area in which Moore has grown the most is being able to create a setting that doesn't involve himself. You rarely, espeically compared to his other movies, see him at all. Everyone has talked about the footage of Bush sitting in the classroom while the towers crumble being in the movie. What nobody has talked about, which is surprising as it's one of the more powerful things in the movie, is Moore asking in a voice over what Bush was thinking.
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Instead of assuming he was dumb-founded, Moore wonders if Bush is wondering which of the powerful Middle East interest, whom he and his family has considered friends over the years, has betrayed him. It's followed up shortly thereafter by the image of Bush and the Saudi ambassador sitting on a balcony on the White House, having a cigar, while watching the pentagon smoldering in ruins. They are two powerful moments, likely to give you pause to re-think Bush, no matter what you thought going in.
