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Moore Controversy: One rambling critic
tackles another
(Web Del Sol, June 2004)
When it came to the
handling of Michael Moore’s acerbic documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the
conservative powers at Disney (which owns Miramax, the production company
behind the film) weren’t too astute. If they were trying to snuff it from
distribution, then why did they sell it back to Harvey and Bob Weinstein? You
knew the co-founders of Miramax would find a distributor—and they did,
through longtime ally, Lions Gate. Plus, by creating a maelstrom of
controversy when they dug in their heels and said they wouldn’t release the
Bush bashing polemic, Disney forever conjoined itself to the film. Any effort
to distance themselves backlashed
and all but assured box-office success.
In its opening week alone, “Fahrenheit 9/11” raked in over twenty
million dollars and was the number one grossing film, making it the first
documentary ever to score the top spot (which it did on 800 plus screens; the
runner up, “White Chicks” was available for viewing on 2,400 plus screens).
That same week, Disney released the slight, feel-good documentary “America’s Heart and Soul.” Whatever they’d hoped to gain
by the gesture (the film didn’t even earn a paltry $200,000 in the opening
week), it’s clear that the lessons learned in the wake of the Mel Gibson and
¡°The Passion of the Christ¡± brouhaha hadn’t sunk in at Mickey and Co.
The marriage between
Miramax and Disney (which purchased Miramax in the mid 90s) has always been
an odd duck. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense; a “Kill
Bill” movie costs about half of what it takes to cook a Jerry
Bruckheimer-produced film (take “Gone in 60 Seconds” or “Enemy of the State”)
and yet nets as much, if not more—less cash up front, greater ROI. Not to
mention that since 1994, when “Pulp Fiction” crashed the Oscar party, Miramax
has been a perennial force, if not dynasty, at the annual Hollywood awards pageant (“Chicago,” “Shakespeare in Love,”
“The English Patient” and so on). Conceptually however, Miramax staples like
hit man Vincent Vega or Billy Bob Thorton’s “Bad
Santa” don't quite fit the image of clean family fun that Mickey, Snow White
and Donald have come to represent (though Disney’s no stranger to odd ties;
one of its tentacles owns the radio channel that controversial right-wing talkmeister Rush Limbaugh employs as a bully pulpit). And
while I’m not certain where Disney head, Michael Eisner’s political
allegiances lie, it is intriguing to note that the mega conglomerate’s big
dollar theme park is located in Florida, which is governed by the brother of Moore’s target, Jeb Bush.
Ironically (or poetically depending on what side you come down on) much of
Moore’s pot-stirring spectacle, which took top honors at this year’s Cannes
Film Festival, keeps winding it’s way back to the Sunshine State. It opens
there with a quick recap of Election 2000, deriding Jeb
and the Republican Party for hijacking the presidency (it always comes back
to those dang hanging chads!) and later, hangs on a
bewildered Dubya as he’s informed of the attacks on
the World Trade Towers while visiting a Florida elementary school.
Moore’s never been the meticulous documentarian
that D.A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman or Errol
Morris are; he’s more of cinematic pundit who
employs shock and droll wit to hammer home his points. Forget about laying
out facts in a stepwise fashion or building a convincing argument, a typical
Moore tactic is to launch a salvo of incendiary imagery purposefully
juxtaposed to evoke on a visceral level. Take Bush sitting stupefied and
inept as he learns of the attacks, then lounging slovenly in a golf cart, and
most damming, as he smugly addresses an audience of affluence as his “base.”
The mélange hits with biting accuracy, but does that make Moore an ingenious
stalwart of leftwing liberalism or a shameless manipulator of the Bush
blooper reel? Truth be told, he’s a pinch of both, but he’s got to watch it;
his self-aggrandizing demagoguery nearly capsizes “Fahrenheit 9/11” (long
gone is the earnest journalist who made “Roger & Me”), and by pursuing
Bush with such pit-bull virulence, he subverts journalistic objectivity and
threatens the overall credibility of his mission. And then there are the
cheap shots. The guitar riff from Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” incessantly
demonizing Bush’s alleged youthful transgression and during the “seven
minutes” at the elementary school, Moore adds an unnecessary voice-over as if he’s the
voice of Dubya. “Who screwed me?” he says in his
scruffy, everyman’s twang. The point he’s trying to make (that Bush was only
thinking of himself and not his country) is abstruse and worse, it’s cavil
and nearly as smug as Bush as he hangs at the fete’s podium, basking in glow
of his “base.” That said, nothing in
“Fahrenheit 9/11” tops Moore’s pathetic assault on an Alzheimer’s addled
Charlton Heston in (the otherwise brilliant)
“Bowling for Columbine,” which still remains his all-time low.
The most poignant moments
in “Fahrenheit 9/11” come when Moore yields the screen to others. The interview
snippets from servicemen in Iraq initially illustrate young, naïve
instruments of the Bush administration, but later, some older, more grizzled
soldiers express their disillusionment with their mission and rational for
being there. Moore also scores some
comical and wholly affecting moments when he corners several U. S.
Congressmen and Senators and solicits them to send their children to the war
(Moore previously informs us that the troop base, much like Vietnam, is
comprised of those from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder and that
only one U. S. Legislator has an offspring in the war). And then there’s Lila Lipscomb, mother of a
G.I. killed in action, shaking with emotion as she reads her son’s final
letter imploring his family to do whatever possible to get Bush out of the
White House. No mater how much Moore leans on her to propel his agenda (he
drags her down to Washington to conjure conflict), her anguish and anger
remain genuine. Beyond her obvious political value, Lipscomb also marks a
critical checkpoint for Moore. She’s a resident of Flint, Michigan, Moore’s hometown, which he goes out of his way to
reference in all his films (his first film, “Roger & Me,” was about Flint’s economic decimation due to the General Motors
shutdowns in the 80s). And Moore
muscles in the celebrity sound bites too.
In “Bowling for Columbine” goth rocker,
Marilyn Manson provided some surprisingly astute observations about rock
lyrics and gun control, in ¡°Roger & Me,¡± it was game show host Bob
Eubanks serving up the cheesy nostalgia, and in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a ditzy
Britney Spears blindly throws her blondeness behind the president. In short, Moore has found a two-step approach that appeals to his
“base” and he sticks with it.
Respectively though,
“Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t Moore’s most tightly focused effort, it’s more akin
to the director’s penned works (“Stupid White Men” and “Dude Where’s My
Country”) than “Bowling for Columbine” or “Roger & Me,” which pretty much
amounts to a sloppy, yet amiable rant against the establishment. Moore simply
wants Bush out of the White House and vehemently asserts his will on the
screen. And like his pulp works, “Fahrenheit 9/11” plays any angle it can to
take Bush’s knees out from under him, be it the Election 2000 controversy,
dubious oil ties with the Saudis, the hyperbolic projection of Dubya’s inaction during the World Trade Tower attacks or
the quagmire known as Iraq.
Bombastic overtones
aside, there’s no denying “Fahrenheit 9/11”’s power to provoke, the begging
question however, is: come November, will it have any sway on the 2004
Presidential election? Obviously Moore and the Weinsteins
felt strongly enough to make sure it got into theaters before the June
handover of Iraq, which one would assume, would also be enough time to sink in before
the election. But if Moore
really wanted to incite Bush’s ejection from the White House, he needed to
come up with a smoking gun (the liberal equivalent of WMD) or at least
endorse the Bush’s opponent in waiting. Yet neither occurs in the film. Much
of what’s rendered is accusation, or a regurgitation of what’s known and long
been conjectured (the findings by the 9/11 Commission and Senate panel are far
more sobering and illuminating), and as far as supporting Bush’s opposition
goes, Moore had thrown his weight behind General Wesley Clark, the late
Democrat entry who disappeared from the field faster than water on a hot
griddle—thankfully though, Moore’s not liberal, or impractical enough to jump
on the Nader train, not yet any way.
When the election machine
finally roars into full swing this fall, “Fahrenheit 9/11” won’t tilt the
vote to John Kerry. It’s a nice idea, but a flash in the pan doesn’t change
an individual’s political ideology that’s been fostered and hardened over
years. It has however served as political smelling salts to the American
public. Conservatives have become cemented in their defense of Bush, the
pulse of liberals has quickened (outside my local movie theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts throngs of activists have been peppering “Fahrenheit 9/11” filmgoers
with various calls to action) and those on the fence will have plenty more to
chew on. Perhaps the heightened awareness will yield a greater voter turnout?
And when Moore disengages from his Bush-hating mode, he does
raise some salient questions about the true weight of a voter’s voice, the
manner in which governmental policies are executed and poignantly poses the
notion that America may in fact be a hegemony dressed up as a
democracy. But like most leftwing
diatribes critical of the reigning administration, “Fahrenheit 9/11” tosses
up a battery of issues and offers few solutions. After the election passes
and the box office totals are tallied, two things will be certain:
“Fahrenheit 9/11” will go on to become most profitable documentary on record
and Moore’s whirlwind success will incite a sudden outbreak of people seizing
up video cameras, digging through archival footage and emblazoning their
socio-political crusades on celluloid (Morgan Spurlock’s already got his
hands on a hit with “Super Size Me”). And don’t feel too bad for the folks at
Disney, nor assume a trove for Moore and the Weinsteins;
Disney, when they sold the film, stipulated that 60% of the profits had to be
earmarked for a charity of their picking. Those charities have yet to be
selected, so let’s just hope that the people at Mickey and Co. do the right
thing and send the till to the families of those who perished on 9/11 and the
battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
- TBM
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