So I just got back from Fahrenheit 9/11 and honestly I’m a bit underwhelmed. Is it a good film? Yes, fairly, but it’s not a great film by any definition and though I’ve only seen one of the other films that were in competition at Cannes this year (that being Old Boy) I’m pretty confident that Moore won the Palme D’Or for his politics more than his film.
Moore’s greatest assets – his freewheeling style and the fact that he answers to absolutely nobody other than himself – are also his greatest weaknesses here. When an artist has no outside input, no matter what medium they work in, they run the risk of becoming so caught up in the small details of their work that they lose sight of the overall structure and so the work as a whole suffers to preserve certain individual moments. That seems to be the case here. Beyond the general goal of criticizing President Bush Moore doesn’t seem to know what exactly he wants Fahrenheit 9/11 to be. Is this a film critical of policy? Of ethic? Of personality? Of the media? Is it a factual argument or a human interest piece? Yes and no to all of the above. It’s as though Moore had so much material to choose from – and lord knows that you could put together a full feature from any of those angles – that he instead opted not to choose at all and instead jammed little bits and pieces of everything together. The result is a film that is more than a little bit schizophrenic in approach, with no clear thesis, with more than a couple awkward transitions in tone and content, that gave me just enough of a good number of issues and approaches to leave me wanting a more in depth look just to leave me frustrated as he moved on to the next thing. Throw in a couple of extraneous sequences seemingly thrown in to satisfy Moore’s particular fixations – the unnecessary, and largely irrelevant to the film, recap of the contested election; the sequence on the Saudi ambassador that seems to be included largely so Moore can include a shot of himself being questioned by the Secret Service – and you’ve got something that shows flashes of excellence without ever quite getting there.
On to the actual content. The first half of the film is dominantly comprised of old newsreel footage tracking the past four years of American politics. This stretch aims to establish the backgrounds of Bush and a few of his cohorts, the business ties running behind the White House, and an overview of both military actions taken after the 9/11 attack. He’s set himself a lot of ground to cover here, and this broad range is likely the cause of a lot of the problems listed above. This was the section that promised to be about policy analysis and was what I most wanted the whole film to be about. This is also where I was most frustrated by the lack of depth – he simply has so much ground to cover that he can’t stop anywhere for long. If you’re a news junkie – which I am, reading two papers (one right leaning, one left) from cover to cover most days – you’re not going to find a lot here that you don’t already know. This section isn’t so much about new information as it is about presentation, trying to establish links and show an obvious progression of events, and the one real direct hit this section makes is the sequence intercutting Bush and his key advisors in 2003 ranting about the threat posed by Iraq and Hussein’s supposed bio-chem and nuclear programs with footage from 2001 in which all of the same people state strongly that Hussein poses no military threat whatsoever, has no bio-chem or nuclear programs to speak of, is being closely monitored and cannot possibly bring in any of said bio-chem or nuclear technology.
The second half of the film keys largely on the war in Iraq and takes a more human interest angle. There are extended sequences interviewing soldiers in the field – these sequences could have easily carried a film on their own – along with recruitment officers in Flint, and the family of a slain soldier. This part of the film is purely subjective – there is no attempt to convey any sort of factual information, it’s purely about putting a human faces both American and Iraqi on the war effort and making the human cost of war painfully clear. That R rating? Mostly because of stuff in this part of the film, nothing not seen on the nightly news, and I still say the hard rating was unnecessary.
On the whole it’s a good film that should’ve been better. It absolutely will not change anybody’s mind about much of anything if for no other reason than that Moore moves too quickly to provide any sort of detailed argument and actually seems largely uninterested in providing any such argument. Unlike Bowling For Columbine – which is a much better film and far more focused – this one seems to be content to preach to the choir, a situation that Moore seems to have acknowledged in recent interviews.
