Fahrenheit 9/11 Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)June 29th, 2004
Jonathan Richards
FAHRENHEIT 9/11
Documentary
Written and Directed by Michael Moore
Rated R, 110 minutes
MIKE'S PET GOAT
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; I would remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention
Michael Moore wants to make you mad. And the chances are pretty good he's going to do it. Whether you're a knee-jerk liberal, a knee-jerk conservative, or somewhere in the wide open spaces in between, there will be plenty in Moore's goading, galvanizing, fiercely opinionated cry from the heart to bring your blood to a boil. Heck, he's even got people mad who haven't seen the movie.
Moore has created a first-rate polemic. It is a flat-out attack on the policies, priorities, and associations of George W. Bush, the Bush family, and the Bush administration. It is constructed as two movies. The first lays bare an eye-opening montage of connections between the Bush family and their associates, and the rulers of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers. The second takes on the war in Iraq. The President does not cut an appealing figure in either.
Moore opens with a review of the murky machinations that decided the 2000 election. Then, against a black screen, he delivers the sounds of the planes hitting the World Trade Center, leaving us to fill in the awful pictures from the vivid storehouse of our memories. When visuals come up, they are of ash falling like snow on lower Manhattan, and papers blowing like ghosts in the wind. Then he takes us down to Florida, where the President of the United States is arriving at an elementary school to visit with first graders.
What follows may be the most extraordinary footage in a movie full of arresting images. By the time the presidential caravan rolls into the school, the first plane has struck. Mr. Bush goes ahead in. As he is sitting in the classroom, an aide comes in and whispers in his ear the news of the second plane. The aide leaves. The President sits there, as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Nobody does. He picks up a children's book called My Pet Goat. The minutes tick away. And in voiceover, the director begins to take us on a tour of the ties that bind the fortunes of the Bush family to the House of Saud.
We discover that the Saudis have pumped at least 1.4 billion dollars over the past two decades into businesses with Bush affiliations, companies like Harken Energy and the Carlyle Group. Moore takes us to the M Street Ritz, the site of a Carlyle Group board meeting where George H. W. Bush and a few bin Ladens were doing business when the airliners struck.
In the second half of the movie we see the war in Iraq, as we have not seen it on television here. Some of the footage Moore shows is the kind of image the Al Jazeera network has been excoriated for broadcasting – mutilated Iraqi children, wounded and dead American soldiers. Moore argues that this is the reality of war, and we need to understand what we're involved in. (The movie has been slapped with an R rating, which means that kids almost old enough to serve in Iraq will be protected from seeing these things. Another factor in the rating is a rock song favored by our soldiers in combat, which features a four-syllable word beginning with "mother".)
There have been many cries of foul, but so far no significant refutation of facts. According to the New York Times last week, "central assertions of fact in Fahrenheit 9/11 are supported by the public record." Some have faulted Moore for showing scenes of happy families and children playing in pre-invasion Iraq . There has been controversy surrounding his claim that a group of Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, were facilitated in flying out of the country two days after the attack, when much of U.S. airspace was still closed. But it appears to be true. Moore wonders what the reaction would have been if Clinton had taken similar care of the McVeigh family after Oklahoma City.
This is an attitude film. Quentin Tarantino to the contrary, the same movie with a pro-Bush bias would have been hooted off the stage at Cannes. Detractors have derided it for not being "fair and balanced", claiming that its one-sidedness goes against the tradition of documentary filmmaking. This is nonsense. It would be hard to find an anti-war documentary that makes much of a case for the other side – Oscar winner Hearts and Minds (1974) comes to mind. To be sure, there are cheap shots in Moore's film – over the credits, members of the Bush team are shown being made up for television, as if this were a fatuous thing. It isn't, but it's funny. But Moore antagonists who scold the filmmaker with the claim that it's too easy to make this President look stupid are not doing the victim any favors.
Moore makes no bones about the fact that his movie is a political statement. He has said he hopes it will influence the Presidential election this fall. It may. Audiences are cheering and booing and weeping, rising in applause, lingering afterwards to talk, unwilling to go home. The counterattack, understandably, has kicked into high gear. Efforts are being made to stop the movie's distribution, ban its advertising, smear its director, and denounce it in the national media. An "answer movie" called Michael Moore Hates America is being rushed out. If there is one thing clear as day about this film, whether one takes it as heroically on target or dangerously misguided, it is that it springs from the filmmaker's deep love of the country that he sees as being hijacked by forces leading it to catastrophe.
As George W. Bush visited Ireland this weekend, the leader of the Irish Senate declared "Nobody denies we have an affinity with the United States, but that is a different matter from having an affinity with the president." Michael Moore feels the same way. So do a lot of people around this country and around the world, who would agree in spirit if not in enunciation with Mr. Bush's famous pronouncement: "Fool me once, shame on…shame on…you; fool me…you can't get fooled again."
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