Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore
Michael Moore is biased. This seems to be about as close to an absolute truth as you can get in modern political discourse. It's a given, right from the off, every time he's about to release a new work, that before anyone's even seen it, it will be written off as being hopelessly lopsided and chock-full of sneaky editing by all of the right and even large chunks of the centre. With US presidential elections looming, the campaign to discredit Moore is going into overdrive (witness: 'Michael Moore Hates America', a counter documentary by Michael Wilson, or David Hardy and Jason Clarke's undoubtedly precociously subtle book 'Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man').
The curious oversight made by many assessing these claims is in looking at who is making them: the White House (of course), Fox 'News', the NRA; hardly considered paragons of virtue, truth, or impartiality. To be 'biased', by dictionary definition, is to act unfairly based on discrimination or prejudice; Moore has an angle - there's no doubt about that. Put simply, he wants Bush out of office, although not once during Fahrenheit 9/11 does he explicitly state this goal - and he will neatly splice together unrelated scenes and items to force home his points, but he does base them on facts; events that can be proved to have happened. His dislike of Bush is based not on prejudice, but upon a consideration of Bush's record.
Michael Moore is not biased. He has a very particular style which make accusations of bias easy, and has a habit of including slightly unneccessary and mildly unfair passages, but no one would bother to go and see the film if it was just a ream of statistics being presented.
Unfortunately, he opens the film with one of these passages - in previously unseen footage of the 2000 presidential election, he shows Bush and his team preparing for television appearances in all their unflattering glory. Paul Wolfowitz spits on a comb before brushing his hair; Bush rolls his eyes left and right while a lady tries desperately to fix his straying barnet. It fits in with the general theme of the film - the USA 'elected' an idiot in 2000 - but it's hardly a work of magnificent investigative journalism to show Bush with his guard down, when he's not even commenting on policy.
But with this low point out of the way early on in proceedings, he sets about his task with gusto: in questioning how seriously Bush took and prepared for the terrorist threat, he speculates that perhaps the briefing Bush received warning of pending attacks was too vague; cut to national security advisor Condoleeza Rice recalling that it was entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike Within US'.
Humour is not Moore's only tool, however. In dealing with the day of 9/11 itself, Moore opts not for the spectacular footage of the crashes, preferring instead a plain black screen, with a soundtrack of the accompanying panic, terror, and destruction. Somehow this is more affecting than seeing the planes strike the towers yet again, and shows a real touch of sensitivity and compassion on Moore's part.
He goes on to cover familiar ground for readers of his most recent book, 'Dude, Where's My Country?'. He questions why twenty four members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the US when all other planes were grounded. He shows frankly unbelievable footage of Bush sitting in a primary school, reading 'My Pet Goat' with the class for an astonishingly long time after being told of the WTO attacks; Bush's obvious shock and indecision is striking. He reminds us of the long-forgotten Afghanistan, and points out what an utterly half-arsed attempt was made at catching Bin Laden, while spotlighting how a gas pipeline deal - extremely profitable for a number of US companies - was signed soon after the US had installed new president Hamid Karzai, a former employee of Unocal (a US oil multinational).
The Bush family relationship with the House of Saud is brought under intensive scrutiny as Moore posits the now-familiar idea that Iraq was invaded under false pretences which were less about how much of a threat Iraq was than the fact it sits upon the second largest reserve of oil in the world. But the strength of Fahrenheit 9/11 is in the way Moore succeeds in linking it into the broader picture: illustrating the army's technique of recruiting from the worst off in the country, who then fight to keep in place the very system which keeps them poor; dissecting the infamous PATRIOT act, including getting one congressman to admit that most members of the house had probably not even read it before voting it through. Moore's reaction is to hire an ice cream van and circle Capital Hill, reading the bill over the tannoy to previously ignorant elected representatives.
Much is made of the perceived egotism of Moore's works, but this is one of the few times we actually see him on camera (another being his attempt to get congressmen to sign their children up to the army), content this time to let the pictures he has to show tell their story without his help, assisted by an astute soundtrack.
He adds the human touch with short interviews with US soldiers on active duty, displaying a near-total ignorance of the country they are in, and the people they are around, but simultaneously makes it clear that he is not blaming the young squaddies for the tragic events that have unfolded in Iraq. Easily the most heart-rending part of the film is an extended sequence featuring the mother of a soldier killed on active duty; where she had previously been genuinely proud of her son's and her family's contribution to 'America', she is understandably left a wreck of emotions after her son's death, travelling to the White House to seek an outlet for her sorrow and rage.
This is easily Moore's most thoughtful work to date. He is still bold, still brash. He loves nothing more than to juxtapose two non-sequential events to make a point (most devastatingly, peppering Dick Cheney's speech on how 'humane' and accurate American weapons are with scenes of civilian suffering in the wake of (presumably) mis-directed attacks). Moments like the now famous "Now watch this drive" incident are fairly trivial, really. But regardless of this, Moore has created a passionate, visceral, almost-clinical dissection of Bush's term in office, offering indisputable fact after indisputable fact to back up his claims.
Of course, you could sometimes be forgiven for wondering if the US inhabited solely by clueless, Cleetus-esque slack-jawed yokels on the strength of this film; but then these are the people that Moore wants to talk about, in an attempt to alert them to the situation they find themselves in.
Does Moore achieve everything he wanted to with Fahrenheit 9/11? Probably. There are times you can't help but feel that he's stopped just short of going for the jugular, but then you remember that Michael Moore
doesn't hate America; in truth, this film embodies more American values than Bush ever will, with its passionate belief in freedom of speech, the right to criticise, and its stimulation of democratic activity. If works like this do not receive the attention they deserve, then what claim to democracy can the US possibly have?
You'll not be shocked by most of the claims Moore makes. You will be shocked by some of the grainy footage, which is there not for this shock-factor, but to show the harsh reality of the results of Bush foreign policy. You'll be more than a little moved by the human suffering on display, both in Iraq and the US. But most of all, you'll be made... no, compelled to think.
And that, I suspect, is exactly the reaction Moore was looking for.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is out now. www.michaelmoore.com www.michaelmoorehatesamerica.com 
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