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"Fahrenheit 9/11" 2 out of 5 stars Director: Michael Moore
When politics are in the movies, politics must also be in the reviews, so let's be open about it: I believe that the Bush administration is clumsy, callous and reflexively mendacious, and it's critical that we get them out of office. People of my like mind are hailing Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a godsend for the cause. So what if it contains all of Moore's trademarks: the pious smarm, the embarrassing contradictions, the distortions, the omissions, the sloppy insinuations posing as cogent accusals? He's a muckraker, not a pundit. Even if he says some stupid things - OK, many - I still agree with the gist of ...
So it goes.
I understand the need to defend Moore; it's the same need a high school coach feels to keep a player on the roster even after he's failed his classes: "Sure, there ought to be standards, but damn it, the big game's this November!" And no one wants to make things easier for the other team. Thus, left-leaning critics who chastised Moore for his grandstanding and deception in "Bowling for Columbine" are pardoning the same offenses in "Fahrenheit 9/11," reassuring us that it's a more "mature" and "responsible" movie.
That pseudo-intellectual "mat-urity" is precisely the thing that makes the movie worse, and duller, than Moore's previous work. Years ago, Moore was content to be America's anti-corporate jester; his populist, candid-camera pranks were a fun way to stick it to the Man. "Bowling for Columbine," for all its stupidities, was an often moving search for the root of American violence. But now Moore wants to be Noam Chomsky lite, and he's as out of his depth in the world of geopolitics as our hapless president is.
Contrary to Moore's boasting, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is only "the story you haven't heard" if you haven't followed the news very closely. It's an anti-Bush greatest-hits package, and all your old favorites are here: the Bush-Saudi angle, the blood-for-oil angle, the "Bush did nothing to stop 9/11" angle, the "Iraq is a distraction from the real fight" angle and several others, all of which have been presented more intelligently elsewhere.
Moore seems blissfully unaware that some of these arguments against Bush exclude, or at least compromise, each other. One moment he accuses Bush of doing nothing to warn us that Bin Laden might strike in the United States; the next he sneers at the whole Homeland Security apparatus and the way it keeps us in fear. You can believe both, but you'd better explain the apparent contradiction instead of pretending none exists. It's called nuance, something Moore appreciates as little as Bush does. He'd rather glom on to any argument that suits him for the moment, make a vague accusation, and hop to the next before our judgment catches up.
Better-informed minds than mine, with more space to devote to the issue, are gearing up for the debate over whether Moore has played it straight with the facts this time around. I believe that the movie's key observations - that Bush is too cozy with prominent Saudi families, that he deceived himself and us about the reasons for attacking Iraq, that the oil industry is set to profit nicely from our war there - are accurate. But find a reasonable critique of this administration and Moore will find an oversimplification that cheapens it.
For example, he refuses to acknowledge that the Iraq situation might be at all complicated. Not once in the movie did I hear the words "Sunni," "Shia," or "Kurd." I think I heard the name "Saddam" twice. I did hear the astonishing claim that Iraq has never attacked, threatened, or killed an American citizen. Even if we forget about the 1991 Gulf War and frequent attacks on American planes patrolling the no-fly zone, this statement, coupled with Moore's decision to represent pre-invasion Iraq with footage of happy children flying kites and well-dressed couples enjoying coffee, implies that Iraq was utterly harmless. Well, Saddam had proven himself to be pretty damn harmful to his own people and to his neighbors, and he didn't exactly encourage anyone's confidence by throwing U.N. weapons inspectors out of his country.
No, I don't much buy the administration's humanitarian rationale for the invasion, but Moore is purging from the record anything that might force him to refine his argument. It's rhetorical cowardice, and it insults every serious thinker who acknowledged the truth about Iraq under Saddam and still came up with a reason not to invade, just as your average jackbooted Toby Keith album insults everyone who reluctantly supported the invasion out of concern for the Iraqi people and the stability of the region.
What Moore really demonstrates in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is how little his brand of smugness differs from Bush's. Like Bush, Moore flatters his constituency with the idea that one side of the story is enough, that as long as we recognize the pure evil of our antagonists, we can disdain details or consistency.
There's a rhetorical arms race afoot in America; each side will build bigger and badder propagandists until we mutually assure the destruction of reason. This is no weak-hearted croak for civility; it's an insistence that we think and act more responsibly than those we attack for their lack of responsibility. Maybe we need more of Michael Moore's outrage. But we don't need Michael Moore.
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