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FAHRENHEIT 9/11 Send This Review to a Friend
It’s no wonder they went nuts over Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” at the Cannes Film Festival, where it took the grand prize. The film is political dynamite and when it is shown widely throughout the United States it looms to be more powerful anti-Bush ammunition than candidate Kerry has yet fired. Moore doesn’t make documentaries. He makes op-ed pieces expressing his personal viewpoint. This film, although plenty colorful in the way Moore editorializes, is very rooted in the facts about how Bush became president via the Supreme Court, the Bush family connections with Saudi Arabia and oil, the false reasons given for attacking Iraq and the sheer disaster the war has unleashed, with American soldiers paying the price with their lives and American taxpayers footing the bill. The film also shows evidence of the terrible toll on Iraq’s civilian population. Scenes of the carnage in Iraq are devastating.
Moore not only skewers the Bush Administration but puts events in a broader context. He demonstrates that unemployment and depressed conditions lead Americans without discernable economic opportunities to enlist in the armed forces. He makes the rounds with military recruiters in a depressed area to illustrate the point. In contrast, he buttonholes Congressmen in Washington with the needling request that they get their sons to enlist. They quickly try to escape. Moore also interviews survivors of soldiers killed in Iraq and reveals personal anguish and resentment.
For all of Bush’s tough talk, Moore shows footage of Bush continuing to read stories to children at a school after he’d been told of the devastating events under way on 9/11. There are also amusing clips that ridicule Bush and his team. That doesn’t prove one way or another that policy is wrong, but it does provide some belly-laughs, as when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is seen preening himself for television by spitting on his hands and smoothing his hair with the saliva.
Moore’s film may be preaching to the converted, but the film is so strong and engrossing that anyone watching it might be stirred in the face of the total picture presented, especially on the mess the nation was misled into in what increasingly been coming apparent as a giant, costly fiasco and a diversion from the real fight against terrorism.
“Fahrenheit 9/11” is a remarkably well made film that is part educational, part agitprop, but always absorbing and even entertaining if you can permit yourself to laugh when the overall situation is anything but funny. A Lions Gate release.
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