“He’s Will Rogers and Mark Twain rolled into one.”*

One of my favorite scenes in Michael Moore's new documentary, the much-hyped Fahrenheit 9/11 occurs as Moore pulls one of his typical farces to rattle the chains of the establishment: Following and accosting Congressmen (undoubtedly conservative Republicans, though Moore does not admit to such tactics) in order to convince them to enlist their children in the armed forces, Moore is expectedly turned away -- at one point, a Congressman who greeted Moore with a wide grin and a friendly first-name salutation eventually tires of him, takes a brochure and leaves by issuing a passive-aggressive smack-down (he literally hits Moore on the chest with the pamphlet). In a moment that uncharacteristically, at least in my reckoning, trumps Moore's own theatricality, we are shown the conflicting responses of two of the congressman's Capitol Hill companions. The first, presumably the Congressman's paid advisor, is none too pleased with the ambush. The second, who any viewer would recognize as the unpaid congressional intern, bears the most telling expression: irrepressible, unmistakably taboo glee.

While Moore always places himself in the role of the viewer's stand-in in his documentaries, the role is momentarily taken on by this subordinate who gets the pleasure of seeing his boss -- a passive-aggressive, arrogant rube -- get his comeuppance. This moment counterbalances Moore's continuously talent as a storyteller (albeit a polemical one) with his "vintage" (as Roger Ebert calls it) stylistic choices. That is, the moment encapsulates not only the eccentric, confrontational bravado with which Moore imbues all of his films but also the emotional core of the film, its patriotic yet second-class citizens, who have been served up like lambs to the slaughter by an elitist presidential administration. The depth and power of F9/11 is that it, unlike Bowling for Columbine and despite the simplified media coverage, ceases to be a film about Moore's own vendettas and opinions in favor of telling a story about all the men and women, like this intern and like Moore's home-town hero Lila Lipscomb, must face the consequences for the actions of the financially dominant sects inside and outside the country. Moore has said in the past that his own film-making philosophy is "When in doubt, cut me out," and he achieves this with his greatest degree of sophistication and sensitivity in F9/11, managing in the end to defer to the real people to whom this patriotic ode is directed even in the midst of his own theatricality.

As always, Moore has a firm grasp on humor, pointing a sharp satirical finger at Bush and his inner circle, the "haves and the have-mores". He incorporates popular music and media clips that drip with self-conscious, snappish irony. Yet in the by most accounts "restrained" F911, Moore interjects these vignettes (case in point, the Gun Smoke send-up indicting George W. Bush's self-perpetuated Texas cowboy image) much less often and much less forcefully than he has earlier, most notably South Park creator Matt Stone's cartoon on the history of arms in America that was at once a hilarious and distracting addition to Bowling for Columbine. To his credit, and undoubtedly because of all the flack he received for his antics post-Columbine's Oscar win (a.k.a. The Acceptance Speech That Will Live in Infamy), Moore steps back in this new film and allows the images (or in the case of the Sept. 11 footage the lack of images) to speak for themselves and, in doing so, constructs his film in a way that is both true to film as an art and much more deeply unsettling than listening to a another one of Moore's soap box sermons.

While most people will draw attention to the plentiful footage of Bush (particularly his confused reaction to the news of the second tower crash) or to Moore's own presence in the film, I return to the instances when Moore sidelines himself (consciously or not) in order to give the story to the constituents who are silenced daily by Bush's government-as-business agenda. Whether the story sees the intern who momentarily revels in the red-faced annoyance of his boss or Lila Lipscombe's heart-rending story of patriotic sacrifice and disenchantment, the moments when Moore's directorial prowess flash boldly like the victorious fireworks that serve as the film's first images. Like those fireworks (championing Al Gore's ill-fated win in Florida and, thus, his close-but-no-cigar ascent to the Oval Office), Moore's film explodes in the face of its viewers, reeking of irony, shedding urgent, immediate light on the way things might have been and trying desperately to turn back the clock and re-claim this country in the name of patriotism, equality and justice for all.

*Harvey Weinstein

Fahrenheit 9/11 website
Michael Moore's website
Rotten Tomatoes
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