George of the Bungle
A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This time, however, the exposé feels even more personal; Moore reveals footage of George W. Bush publicly jeering him. “Behave yourself, willya?” Dubya barks. “Get some real work!” Thus begins Fahrenheit 9/11, which feels like a grudge match between playground adversaries, with the Likable Dork finally standing up to the Repugnant Weasel. Except now they’re using the whole world to duke it out.
Because director Moore claims the home-field advantage in the movie house, Bush loses this match before the opening credits begin. Preceding them, we get Moore slyly recounting that terrifying lapse of democracy back in 2000, when Bush “won” the presidential election. We get stunned newscasters, 16,000 stultified (and mostly black) voters, and Bush’s limo pelted with eggs on his First Big Day. Moore chases all this with the startling figure (from The Washington Post) that George Sr.’s happy-play-hooky son spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office far away from Washington.
The mocking touch of adding the Go-Go’s song “Vacation” seems a little presumptuous so early on, but soon Bush struggles in an archived interview to describe “things” and more “things” and “matters” he’s considering, until his flitting consciousness crash-lands on the assertive-sounding word “initiatives,” and he effectively says nothing yet luxuriates with patriotic pride. This dense appraisal (and appraisal of denseness) is just the beginning for Moore, who spends the whole movie making Bush look bad. (His telling placement of the riff from Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” is priceless.) But within this context — indeed within his career thus far — Bush has done nothing but make Moore’s task a cinch.
At the time of this writing, national headlines are trumpeting a bipartisan commission’s finding that no causal connection links the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the tyranny of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Given an ever-mounting death toll and the irrevocable damage that has followed Bush’s invasion of Iraq, this is potentially damning news for a certain politician and his posse, who remain as aggressively vague in today’s papers as they are throughout Moore’s documentary.
Much like America itself, this project’s strengths lie in its diversity. Using loads of archived clips and new interviews, Moore deftly juggles Bush’s dubious business affairs alongside exhausting terror alerts, bizarre and misguided crackdowns on citizens via the Patriot Act, and the casualty-strewn war in Iraq itself. By juxtaposing unctuous military recruiters stalking the low-end shopping districts of his own Flint, Michigan (where unemployment has been estimated at 50 percent), with psychologically unformed teens gunning down civilians in what appears to have been a not-unpleasant Baghdad, Moore postulates that blood for oil is a bad, bad thing. There’s simply no arguing.
Since he’s fighting a tyrant, though, Moore’s biggest jeopardy here is becoming one, alienating those outside the choir with his mocking and finger-pointing. Indeed, regardless of its fancy awards, distributor quests and rating controversies, this would be ten times the movie if it featured an actual debate between Moore and Bush. Nonetheless, the man makes a remarkably strong case, tastefully inserting himself into the Bush-baiting only when necessary. (One such stroke of brilliance involves personally urging congressmen to send their own kids to Iraq.)
Still, it’s Bush himself who does the heavy lifting. All Moore needs to do is slow down the video of Dubya’s glazed face as the president reads My Pet Goat to schoolchildren in Florida for 7 minutes while his nation is under attack to make the disturbing case that George W. Bush is a dangerous idiot. Fahrenheit 9/11 is certain to have some impact on the upcoming election, but it also presents an artistic challenge: What’s Michael Moore going to do when all the punks leave the playground?
