Fractured Movie Review: Fahrenheit 9/11

What with all the hoopla, I had to go see Michael Moore's latest masterpiece, notwithstanding that I was sure to be subject to a gaudy anti-American diatribe.  How did I know this ?  Because ze French loved it, making it the grand prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival before ever actually watching the movie.  Confronted with the demographic certainty that their senile democracies will cease to exist in less than two generations, Europeans lash out - not at the Arab onslaught which consumes them - but at America.  After all, are we not "Les Hyperpower"?  Kind of puts Jimmy Carter's Nobel prize in perspective.

But I digress.

This movie stunk.  It wasn't the subject matter.  I was prepared for anti-Bush propaganda.  But after sitting through what I objectively estimated to be 2.5 hours of excruciating boredom punctuated by a few genuinely funny moments I feel compelled, not to write a review of this movie, but to psychoanalyze the critics who gushed over it so.  It's badly edited.  The writing sucks.  Most damning of all, Moore entirely runs out of things to say with over an hour left in the movie, leaving him to say the same things over again, badly.  It is less than two hours in length.

His editing is transparently laughable, but brings some of the best - albeit unintentional - humor.  Moore juxtaposes numerous stories, images and time lines to make Bush look culpable, ignorant, clueless, demonic and Machiavellian, all at the same time.  Moore would have you believe that Bush was capable of manipulating the entire world, but incapable of getting out of his own way.  I found myself laughing repeatedly when most everybody else was silent, drawing on more than one occasion an irate glance from several True Believers.

There's gruesome stock footage of injured children, soldiers screaming in pain, interviews with double amputees, but it is jarringly out of place.  He rips off Full Metal Jacket repeatedly, casting himself in the part of Joker.  The succession of interviews with soldiers actually uses whole sentences of dialog from the movie, and several of the interviewees are dead ringers for the cast.  I wonder if I was the only one to notice ?

On several occasions the narrative builds to a punch-line.  Be patient, I tell myself.  Surely he's going to tie it all together in the end, what with the tidbits he's thrown out there: the Bush family has business connections to the House of Saud; bin Laden's family invested in one of GW's oil companies; Dick Cheney ran Halliburton; Halliburton was headquartered in Houston, the same as a company that bid on an oil pipeline through Afghanistan; Enron was also into pipelines; Key Lay of Enron donated money to GW; and so on.  The punch-line never comes.

As usual, Moore insults his audience - or at least that percentage that left there believing what he presented - by presenting absolutely nothing new, as new.  His so-called blockbuster revelations were all tired and talked out months or even years ago.  I've heard Katie Couric in her allotted 45 seconds deliver a more damning critique of Bush's policies than Moore does in two hours, and with Katie we're not talking about someone who does much heavy lifting, rhetorically speaking.   Most of the images he presents are stock TV footage, many of those clumsily filmed from a TV monitor to lend a Cinema Verite quality, but they're badly done.  If the intent is to convey "truth", Moore is ham-handed.  He doesn't so much present words and images to his audience as he does beat them over the head with them.  Then again, maybe he knows his audience.

The one portion of the movie I most enjoyed was what I will call The Freak Show.   As in "Roger and Me", most of the people Moore talks to are demented or physically deformed in some way, like the rabbit killer from "Roger".  Virtually all of his "experts" had some grotesque tic or physical characteristic, such as the intelligence analyst who had a lush knot of hair literally in the middle of his forehead, with the rest of his skull virtually bald.  I'm sure the guy had something compelling to say, but I couldn't get past his cartoonish appearance.  All of the people that Moore portrayed as being genuine and good were also physically ugly.  All of the attractive people that made it onto the screen were venial and cold-hearted.  The better looking you were, the more badly you came out.

Lacking any fresh material or an original way to present it, Moore inflated one running interview to almost 20 minutes of screen time, and then, apropos of absolutely nothing, started doing "man on the street" interviews with the citizens of Flint, his home town.  More stock footage that I swear I also saw in "Roger and Me" twenty years ago, and then on to a meandering stretch following two Marine recruiters through a shopping mall in Flint.  The point of that sequence ?  Unemployment in Flint is 15%, but UNDEREMPLOYMENT is almost 50%, and that's just as bad as having no job at all, see, so poor people join the army.  No word from Moore as to who was responsible for Flint's chronic underemployment this time, most certainly not the citizens of Flint, who nonetheless come off looking like a bunch of slackers in his films, again.  He would have blamed General Motors, I'm sure, except that GM has almost nothing left in Flint, and Moore was too lazy to connect GM to the Iraq/Bush/Halliburton cabal.

Or maybe his imagination simply failed him.

In the end, the movie was a cinematic version of Moore himself: bloated, incoherent and badly packaged.  I'm glad I saw it.  I'm also glad I didn't pay for it.  Now, I only have one remaining question: what was Roger Ebert smoking when he gave this movie "big thumbs WAY up" ?