Bowling For Columbine Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)November 6th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
Written and Directed by Michael Moore
Rated R, 119 minutes
There is a heavy dose of preaching to the choir in Michael Moore's roof-raising documentary on gun violence in America, and audience reaction will have a lot to do with where people stand on issues ranging from guns and violence to racism, fear, and the American way. But that said, Moore is a hell of a preacher. The sidewalks outside the movie theaters showing "Bowling for Columbine" are not likely to be littered with converts. But they should be alive with people thinking and talking and arguing, and what preacher worth his salt doesn't live for just that?
"Bowling for Columbine" takes as its text the massacre at the Littleton, Colorado high school where two disaffected teenagers slaughtered schoolmates in a terrifying hail of gunfire. A lot of attention was paid at the time to the fact that these kids listened to rocker Marilyn Manson. Moore points out that they also went bowling that morning. Facts are malleable things. It's how we put them together that determines what we make of them.
Moore's moviemaking style mirrors his personal style; it's unkempt and impulsive, hilarious and dogged. It was said of Heywood Broun, a legendary journalist of another generation, that he looked like an unmade bed, and the description fits Moore like a rumpled shirt. He strews the screen with observations and interviews like an absent-minded professor pulling notes from his pockets. After a while these tumbling snippets begin to take form and add up to something. One of the intriguing aspects to "Bowling for Columbine" is that Moore never claims to quite figure out what that something is.
He starts us off in the country around his native Flint, Michigan, where militias train and it's considered not just a right but a responsibility to be armed, where one of the Columbine killers spent some time, where Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols talked and plotted, where Terry's wild-eyed brother James grows soybeans and keeps a loaded magnum under his pillow... and where a local bank is running a promotion giving away a gun to customers who open a new account. "Don't you think it's a little dangerous handing out guns in a bank?" Moore asks, sighting past the teller cages along the softly gleaming barrel of his new gift rifle.
The shape of Moore's inquiry in this volatile, provocative, and absurdly entertaining polemic is the pursuit of the question of why Americans kill each other with guns in such startlingly higher numbers than do the citizens of any other industrialized nation on earth. It doesn't seem to be directly tied to gun ownership, or availability, or gun control laws, which are similar to those of Canada, where gun homicides are rare and people don't lock their doors. Moore speculates that it may be linked to the heritage of a society with a history of militarism and violence, but then he observes that Germany's annual total that year was 381, and Great Britain's was 68. Could it be tied to violence in movies and television? Japan's gun homicide ledger showed 39. The United States figure for that calendar year came to 11,217.
Some people will complain that Moore's argument is slanted and unfair, and that position is not difficult to defend. He sets people up and makes them look like fools. This is the satirist's job, and Moore is a grade-A, full-bore, no-holds-barred satirist. He makes no claim to be the evening news with its portfolio of objectivity, a portfolio Moore shreds with a few sharply-directed slashes at television journalism (which he holds as responsible as anything for this country's climate of fear.) He even takes his camera to the Hollywood home of Charlton Heston, and some will find shame in his dissection of the NRA apologist after Heston has graciously opened his doors to be interviewed. But Heston's uncanny ability to show up for stem-winding gun rallies ("From my cold dead hands!") in communities still weeping from devastation by firearm violence (just last week in Arizona) makes him fair game, and in the end the effect that lingers from that interview is not Moore's want of delicacy, but Heston's inability to muster thoughtful answers to a few plain and simple questions.
But the larger questions Moore poses are neither plain nor simple, and the answers are not settled here. Our perception of the way things are is a large shaper of our reality - as Moore points out, the way our kids today go trick-or-treating on Halloween is a far cry from the happy-go-lucky freedom of a few generations back, and it's in large part due to urban legends like razors being put in apples, although there is no instance on record of a razor ever being found in a Halloween apple. Maybe if we can figure out the answer to that riddle, it'll connect a dot in the puzzle of why our culture is so prone to solving its problems with the barrel of a gun.
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