- It was strident, passionate, sometimes outrageously manipulative
and often bafflingly selective in its material, but Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11 was a barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary
device into the crowded Cannes festival.
-
- It included a full-scale denunciation of the links between
the Bush and Bin Laden families, the petro-commercial association which
allowed dozens of the Bin Laden family to leave the country for Saudi Arabia
after 9/11 and which necessitated the Iraq war as a massive diversion.
-
- Moore also has queasy new war zone footage of US soldiers
humiliating their prisoners while others snap away with their digital cameras,
although he is noticeably keen to demonise the politicians, not the military.
-
- A documentary is highly unlikely to win the Golden Palm,
but this was an exhilarating and even refreshing film, especially coming
at a time when political commentators on either side of the Atlantic -
progressives and ex-progressives alike - are apparently too worldly and
sophisticated to be angry about the war.
-
- At Cannes this time last year, Franco-American relations
were so bad and feelings so high that this movie could hardly have been
shown without a riot. Now it was received in a mood of simmering, twitchy
consensus. One American PR cracked: "It made me wanna burn my passport!"
-
- There are fewer of the jokes and wacky stunts that entranced
and enraged in his anti-gun documentary Bowling For Columbine; it is mostly
a straight stitching together of clips and graphics with Moore's droll,
faux-naif voiceover.
-
- It does not have a big "showdown" moment, like
Moore's encounter with Charlton Heston, although the director shouts out
questions to the president he derisively calls Governor Bush and is rewarded
by him with a snarling suggestion that he should get a real job, which
takes some effrontery coming from the slacker fratboy head of state who
makes Ronald Reagan's workload look Stakhanovite.
-
- Fahrenheit 9/11 cheekily begins with "feed"
footage of the major players - Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and
Paul Wolfowitz - smirking, and preening themselves as they prepare to go
on TV. Wolfowitz even has a habit of licking his comb before running it
through his hair, which got a deafening "eeeuuuuuwwwww" from
the audience.
-
- Here they are, is the implication, the whole corrupt
gang who fixed the 2000 election, which began when Bush's cousin John Ellis,
a Fox News executive, was instrumental in "calling it" for Bush/Cheney
on election night and cowed the other networks into joining in.
-
- >From there, Moore sketches out the Texan-Saudi link
through the Bin Ladens. This very much involves George Bush Sr, who far
from being a retired old gentleman, is a vigorous player in the business
and political scene, fully availing himself of the ex-presidential prerogative
of receiving intelligence briefings.
-
- Moore has a terrifying and funny sequence when he shows
the rabbit-in-car-headlights expression on the president's face when he
is told about the second plane hitting the towers while at a children's
literacy event. A stopwatch appears in the corner of the screen, as the
minutes tick by and the president keeps reading My Pet Goat, not knowing
what to do without his advisers to tell him.
-
- The Afghanistan war comes and goes without the capture
of Osama bin Laden, although Moore stops short of saying the Bush administration
doesn't want the embarrassment of catching him. Terrorism licences the
big war on the diplomatically safe target of Iraq, in whose reconstruction
the big companies have a vested interest, and Moore's overall narrative
arc takes us to the homeland security issue, its concomitant politically
profitable culture of fear, and the US military's recruiting grounds of
blue collar America, getting poor blacks and whites to fight Mr Bush's
war as the body count ratchets upwards.
-
- Moore centres a big emotional moment on a bereaved military
mom, mourning her son outside the White House. This explains Moore's reluctance
to emphasise the issue of torture.
-
- Moore's big omission is Tony Blair and the UK. He has
a clever pastiche of the opening title-sequence of the old TV western Bonanza,
with Bush and Blair mocked up to look like cowboys. But in a section about
the ramshackle "coalition of the willing" which was supposed
to lend international legitimacy to the invasion, there is no mention of
the part played by this country. This can only be because of Moore's insistence
on America's international isolation and arrogance. It's a strange, skewed
perspective.
-
- Meanwhile wrangling about corporate pressure on Moore
goes on. The director himself claims that Mel Gibson, head of Icon films,
was told "don't expect any more invitations from the White House if
you fund this film". Gibson made a lot of money with The Passion of
the Christ, tapping into an international network of Christian cinemagoers.
There are millions of anti-Bush people all over the world. The Passion
of Michael Moore could yet be a hot ticket.
-
- - Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1219237,00.html
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