"Fahrenheit 9/11" has been surrounded by a handy halo of buzz: First, Miramax's parent company, Disney, announced it wouldn't release the film, although it was embarrassed into handing it over to Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who subsequently found distributors for it (Lion's Gate and IFC Films). The movie's woes didn't stop there: Right-winger Howard Kaloogian, a former California state legislator who claims credit for squelching the CBS Ronald Reagan biopic, has spearheaded a campaign to harass and intimidate theaters into refusing to show the film. (MoveOn.org has countered by urging audiences to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" on its opening day to spur a groundswell of support.)

It's all terrifically lucky for Moore -- you can't buy publicity like that. But I'd also urge moviegoers to see "Control Room," Jehane Noujaim's documentary about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq War, a piece of filmmaking that, like Moore's movie, is antiwar in the broadest sense. But it's also one that, unlike Moore's, is well aware of the dangers of self-certainty and easy answers.

I've heard even die-hard Moore detractors defend "Fahrenheit 9/11," claiming that its flaws don't matter because it speaks to a higher truth. The thinking goes, I suppose, that we need every anti-Bush voice we can get, and Moore, who won an Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine" and has several bestselling books under his belt, is likely to wield more influence than most other voices coming from the left. What's more, even though "Fahrenheit 9/11" isn't journalism, Moore presents his findings with an air of authority. Moore believes the press has let us down in calling Bush on his fraudulence and falseheartedness, and he's right. Still, the tradition, craft and standards of journalism have to count for something: Should we really be holding up cheap shots, inference and sloppy reporting as gateways to the truth?

Moore is a very specific and slippery kind of bully: He glides along on his underdog status as if it were a parade float. He professes to feel great compassion for the common man. Yet over and over again, in movie after movie, he invites the audience to chuckle over ordinary people. Why? In "Fahrenheit 9/11" he lists the countries that stepped forward as members of Bush's Coalition of the Willing (Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, Romania, Morocco, and the Netherlands among them), accompanied by funny stock footage of people in costumes of many lands. If Moore is the left's great spokesman by default, shouldn't he be using his influence (not to mention his money) to raise the level of political discourse in this country instead of lowering it? Instead we have a filmmaker who manages the feat of getting liberal audiences to laugh at how funny those foreigners are.

"Fahrenheit 9/11"

Directed by Michael Moore

Just after 9/11, Moore wrote a publicly circulated letter musing about the meaning and possible causes of the attacks. In the letter, Moore talked out of all 16 of sides of his mouth, first expressing sorrow over the tragedy, then attributing the attacks to Americans' desire for cheap sneakers, and later intoning wisely, "It's much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn't look like us."

But somewhere in there, he also wrote, "Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?"

Well, gosh, Michael -- yeah. The lesson learned? Third-world tent dwellers do the darnedest things. It's a shocking and unpredictable world that we little people live in. At least we have Michael Moore to explain it all for us.

Recent Stories