From today's NY Post Entertainment section ---
June 22, 2004 --
Fahrenheit 9/11
Dude, where's my exposé? Running time: 116 minutes.
Not rated (disturbing images). Tomorrow at the Lincoln Plaza and Loews Village VIII (additional theaters on Friday).
'FAHRENHEIT 9/11," Michael Moore's much-hyped and very heavy-handed polemic against George W. Bush, is basically a two-hour argument for regime change that isn't half as incendiary or persuasive as its maker would have you believe.
Far from uncovering the smoking gun that he promised before the movie's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last month, the leftist filmmaker basically rehashes a litany of familiar gripes against Dubya, many of them recycled from Moore's best-selling "Dude, Where's My Country?"
For a liberal who awarded four stars to Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," this wet firecracker of a film is especially disappointing.
Though the version that hits theaters tomorrow is slightly more effective than the edition that won the top prize in Cannes - thanks to additional footage of Dubya and administration officials spouting on increasingly dubious links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, as well as those as-yet-to-be-discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - Moore is still basically preaching to the converted and is unlikely to win over all that many hearts and minds.
Liberals may chortle at the sight of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz slicking down his hair with his own spit to prepare for a TV appearance, or Attorney General John Ashcroft belting out an excruciating self-composed ditty called "Let the Eagle Soar," but these attempts at humor end up undercutting what Moore apparently intends as a mostly serious attack on the president's response to the 9/11 attacks.
Moore comes closer to drawing blood with damning footage of a dazed Bush continuing to read with a group of Florida schoolchildren at a photo op for seven agonizing minutes after learning of the attack on the second World Trade Center tower.
But the filmmaker can't resist going over the top with his sarcastic narration: "What's he thinking, 'I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd? Which of them screwed me?'"
This leads into a long and eyeball-glazing section on the longtime association between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family, including members of Osama bin Laden's large extended clan - not exactly the scandal Moore makes it to be, considering that the Bushes have long been in the oil business, as have the Saudis.
Moore's critics on the right have long complained he plays fast and loose with the facts, and he gives them ammunition by implying that Bush allowed a large contingent of bin Ladens and other Saudis, mostly students, to leave the United States immediately after 9/11, while commercial flights were still grounded.
In fact, the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission has found that most, if not all, of these evacuations took place after Sept. 13, when the ban on commercial flights was lifted - and the evidence weighs against Dubya even being aware of these special flights.
The sheer scope of the material that Moore is trying to cover in a two-hour documentary - the Sept. 11 attacks themselves rate maybe five minutes, less time than is devoted to the Patriot Act and supposed war profiteering by the politically connected Halliburton Corp. - leading to an incredibly superficial and misleading treatment at times.
Sure, there's some graphic footage - apparently shot by one of the camera crews that Moore claims to have smuggled in with embedded troops - showing Iraqis maimed during U.S. air strikes.
We also see American soldiers laughing as they place hoods over Iraqi prisoners, and one GI touching a sleeping detainee's genitals through a blanket.
But the latter scene actually conflicts with one of Moore's main arguments - that GIs have been victimized by being forced to participate in what he considers to be the unnecessary and immoral invasion of Iraq.
He is also shocked, shocked to learn that Army recruiters target areas with heavy minority populations - something that's been true since at least the Vietnam era (though most of the soldiers in Iraq Moore depicts are white).
Moore's big stop-the-presses revelation is that the name of James Bath, an old pal of the president who works as a money manager for the bin Laden family (which has long renounced Osama), was excised from 1972 National Guard records released by the White House. Yawn.
In "Bowling for Columbine," Moore had something new to add to the gun-control debate and did so in a refreshingly entertaining manner.
ŝ/11" does not lend itself to such a glib approach, and while Moore may get laughs by presenting Bush and his staff in a brief "Bonanza" spoof titled "Afghanistan," the humor often seems more forced here.
There is much less footage of Moore himself than in his previous features, possibly because his trademark ambush stunts - like trying to get congressmen to volunteer their children to serve with the military in Iraq - fall so flat.
By far the best sequence features Lila Lipscomb, a patriotic woman from Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., who lost her Marine son in Iraq.
But when she tries to go to the White House to express her newly anti-war feelings, Moore ends up with a pallid echo of the high point of "Columbine," where victims of that high school massacre descend on Kmart headquarters to demand that the chain stop selling ammunition.
The weakest section is the opening, in which Moore revisits the now wearisome accusations that Dubya "stole" the election from Al Gore with help from a right-leaning Supreme Court.
Moore conveniently doesn't mention that in the last election, he was backing Ralph Nader - whose candidacy many believe effectively handed the White House to Bush - or that in "Dude, Where's My Country?" Moore states the next president should be ... Oprah Winfrey!
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Gee, I don't suppose that THIS could be the reason that Disney didn't want to distribute the film could it?
Elliot |
