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For my money, two images in Fahrenheit 9/11 stand out, maybe because I'm of two minds about this guided missile directed at George W. Bush, his family, his administration, and his actions post-9/11. The first image, to take them in chronological order, is well known: Bush in Florida speaking to school children on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. An assistant enters from the left of the shot and whispers in his ear. We can't hear but he tells Bush a passenger airliner hit the World Trade Center and quickly leaves the room. We've been shown this before. And then there's what we haven't: George W. Bush's expression for the next seven minutes.

The narrator of this footage, astonished, explains how after being told that terrorists were attacking America, Bush stayed with the students and continued to read to them, from My Pet Goat. If there's any doubt of this, and there already has been, we watch the time lapse. Teachers, of course, videotaped that day. The assistant returns. A second plane just hit the second tower.

Bush continues to read. And yes, it's incredible, borderline reprehensible, considering the children in the room and threat to the President's life at that moment. And no, he's shouldn't have run from the room, screaming the sky was falling. The narrator, Michael Moore, however, sees it clearly, too clearly: At this point, he wonders, was Bush thinking he shouldn't have spent 42 percent of his term on vacation? Was he wishing he had read those terrorism briefs sitting on his desk? Did he wish he had bothered to read a foreign policy memo, or a newspaper - or just been a better president? Did he wonder if he's in over his head?

Fahrenheit 9/11

Critic’s rating: ****

Written and directed by Michael
Moore. A Lions Gate Films, IFC Films, and Fellowship Adventure Group release, opening today at Showcase Maumee, and rated R for war carnage, beheading, and profanity. Running time: 116 minutes.

Moore says or implies all of this with a mocking tone of moral scorn, and moral scorn can be a beautiful weapon. His point is unapologetically partisan: Bush is unprepared, shallow, arrogant, destructive. It's his opinion. Documentaries, no matter what they tell you, have an opinion; and the good ones argue for it. Still, you and I are not monkeys, and when we watch this footage in the incendiary and undeniably effective Fahrenheit 9/11, opening today in Toledo, it's hard not to deny what we're seeing: We're watching a president in shock. Not a boy who wished he'd done his homework. Perhaps that's true, too. But it's unquestionably the face of a man who's become so paralyzed it's disquieting. He's staring at the book, he's reading words, but we know he's not hearing the sound of his own voice. Unless you're made of wood, no matter how anti-Bush you might be, it's hard not to feel some smidgen of compassion.

Now the other image. It's where all the compassion went; or you could argue it's Moore at his most exploitative. Both are right. Near the end of the film, he heads to Flint, Mich., the hometown he's never shaken off, and finds Lila Lipscomb. She wears an American flag lapel pin, has a state job and a son in Iraq. She encouraged him to join, knowing she couldn't provide better opportunities herself. She reads his last letter, delivered a week before he died. "Mamma," he writes, "they got us out here in the sand for nothing." She has a change of heart, and an eloquence about her grief that's hard to dismiss. Fahrenheit 9/11 will be endlessly nitpicked and argued, as it should, but no matter your view of Moore or your politics, you can't deny her tears.

Michael Moore talks with Flint, Mich., resident Lila Lipscomb, who lost a son in Iraq.

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Chances are, though, you already know what you think about Fahrenheit 9/11 - well, Fahrenheit 9/11 already knows what it thinks, too. It's a lot of things: an op-ed column with visuals, a polemic bristling with anger, a plea to vote Bush out of office come November. But do not call it a documentary. It doesn't dig up any new information. And what it's not is fair and balanced, and it doesn't have to be. You could even say this is a good thing; for two hours Moore makes a forceful case (and occasionally self-contradictory argument) that a political regime that doesn't extend compassion to its most disenfranchised, to the poor who fight its wars and suffer under its economic policies, hardly deserves the benefit of any doubt. Moore's movie comes from righteous anger; he flashes official documents from the public record, piles on video images and playful winks until they gather the headlong rush of an avalanche, never stopping to connect the dots. He's on fire, and there is no talking to the guy. To an extent it's why Fahrenheit 9/11 is his most powerful work.

He's too livid to be fair, and just sloppy enough to mirror our own confusion. Someday this thing will become a time capsule. Bush's election, the USA Patriot Act, the war in Iraq - it's a conspiracy so engulfing, he is saying, so damaging to the very sovereignty of the United States, there's no time for patience and analysis, for stringent journalism. Though that's not entirely the problem. The problem is that his overkill blots out our normal skepticism. There's a rawness to this film that might have had to do with rushing it into theaters in time for the political conventions (and the subsequent DVD, in time for the election), but it's distasteful and cheap to cut from a wailing Iraqi mother to a clip of Britney Spears saying she trusts her president. Take that point about Bush being on vacation 42 percent of the time: It's pathetic, possibly true, but Moore finds more time to mention the President sleeping on "fine French linens" than to ask: so who was running the country 42 percent of those first months in office?

His juxtapositions, too, while entertaining and often biting, are more in line with editorial cartoons than real insight: a shot of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld talking surgical strikes, followed by a shot of a house leveled. What exactly has been proven? A montage of Bush administration members being prettied before going on camera, suggesting they favor image over message - well, everybody is airbrushed on television, including the Oscar-winning Moore.

So I have problems with the guy. He's glib, smirky. He may give the right the same shakes of rage that Rush Limbaugh gives the left, he may have hijacked the right's methods and turned it against them, but he can be just as free of nuance. I'm not awed Fahrenheit 9/11 received a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes or that it won that film festival's top award. Beyond its ability to draw a buzz of controversy and to mobilize an entire social group, if Fahrenheit 9/11 shares anything else with The Passion of the Christ, it's that both preach to the converted, with heavy hands. Moore demands critical thinking but lacks that splash of cold water, that irrefutable shock to the system that challenges conventional wisdom and brings real change.

If Passion director Mel Gibson's single-minded focus on brutality speaks loudest to unquestioning believers, Moore is no different. For some, his footage of Bush's face twisted inward, Bush's eyes shifting mischievously, says it all: This is a scheming, disingenuous presidency - even though the shot doesn't actually say anything. But then Moore is appealing to the robotic agreement of believers. He's not interested in the looking glass. He doesn't peer through it, never has; that's what great documentary filmmakers stare into then come away from, having their assumptions and facts refracted back in a dozen contradictory shades of truth.

Moore makes it all too easy. He is not a great documentary filmmaker. But it hardly seems to matter anymore because he's a cathartic one, no matter who you are - to conservatives, he has no respect for the presidency; to liberals, he has no respect for the presidency. And still Fahrenheit 9/11 is a must-see, a gripping political diatribe - as elaborate, far-reaching, and mocking a rallying cry as political movies have ever delivered. And as a comprehensive recap of the last 3 1/2 years, what it presents is tempting; a kind of Unified Theory of Bush, a synthesis of everything that's gone wrong since Election Night 2000, wrapped into one bracing argument. There are no smoking guns, nothing the 9/11 commission hasn't already brought up, nothing that hasn't been covered by a half-dozen anti-Bush exposes. But there are charges, implications, evidence, and sins.

What Moore brings to all that outrage is a shape. Laid end to end, it might resemble a family tree, with the Bush clan at the top, the root of all evil. And this film is chunky with branches, tracing the 2000 election debacle; attempts by the Bush family to hush up its ties to the rulers of Saudi Arabia, as well as the Bin Ladens; how the administration "played us like an organ" (in the words of one congressman) to instill fear, sell us the Patriot Act and finally a war with Iraq. Through it all, Moore's sardonic voice can be heard, and not just literally: When the camera pans across Bush's Air National Guard records, Moore mentions how the President was suspended once for missing a medical examination, and then we hear, in an almost subliminal blast, the riff of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine."

Moore's signature man-on-the-street bit is pulled out twice, and to good effect: He drives through Capitol Hill, using the loud speaker of an ice cream truck to read the Patriot Act to congressmen who hadn't bothered to read it before they voted for it; he stands outside the Capitol trying to persuade senators to enlist their own children in military service. They scatter like flies. Otherwise Moore is not in a joking mood, and Fahrenheit 9/11 is most compelling when it simply listens to dissent in America: We hear soldiers in the field, a state trooper single-handedly guarding the Oregon coastline. And Lipscomb. Her bitterness toward Bush carries that ring of Joseph Welch asking Senator Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no decency, sir?" It's that ring of outraged patriotism. And Fahrenheit 9/11, even at its most condescending, has it, too. "People think they know but they don't know," Lipscomb says. "I thought I knew. I didn't know."

Contact Christopher Borrelli at:
cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.