Cross-posted from my blog...
I rented it from Netflix and watched it last night, for the first time.
I had been putting off watching it because I figured I pretty much knew everything that was in it, and my vote was already solid. Plus, while I enjoyed Bowling For Columbine, it also left a bad aftertaste because I thought it went over the top on Heston. I felt bad for the guy. Sometimes Moore has this talent at displaying what feels like false indignation for something that we are (and he is) actually truly indignant about. So I was not sure whether that would come across again, and if it would taint my experience of the film. Well, it wasn't quite the same in this film, but it led me to some more thought about who Michael Moore is as a filmmaker. I found Fahrenheit 9/11 a highly emotional film, and yet, I think it's these areas of emotion that give Moore trouble as a filmmaker even while they motivate his heroism. Read on to see what I mean.
The moment that got to me most was watching the Iraqi woman screaming about her village being destroyed. I can't imagine anyone watching that, even the most right-wing fundamentalist, and not being affected by that. She was screaming "Allah Akhbar" and those sorts of things that are unfamiliar to us, but her words would be interrupted by these wracking sobs... and sobs sound the same all over the entire world. It's impossible not to relate to it. When you hear those sobs, that's where you get a glimmering of how deep the wrong is.
I think that no matter how opposed we are to the war or to this administration's choices in the war, we don't get touched by how evil the effects of it are until we see scenes like that. We know it's wrong even while we don't always feel the depth of the wrong. Even if we're opposed to it, we are still on the wrong side of a gap between what life is like here, and understanding what life and death are like there. It's the emotion that can help bridge that gap. But like I said, it's the area of emotion that I think gives Moore the most trouble with these films. Here's what I mean:
Lila Lipscomb was hit and miss for me. I don't doubt that all her emotion was genuine, but there was again some of that feeling that I could just sense, that it was undermined a bit by Moore silently shouting, "See? SEE?!" in the background. What's so frustrating about that is that even though it's there, he's RIGHT. But people pick up on it, and it undermines the presentation. I don't know why. My best theory is that he's got a lot of (understandable) frustration against his viewership, worried that they just won't get it unless he underscores it. He needs to trust the audience more. He's improved since Bowling For Columbine, but he needs to work on it more. One of the hardest lessons to learn about conviction is that there is a difference between expressing/communicating your own conviction, and evoking those responses in others. The Iraqi woman wasn't trying to convince us to feel badly for her. She was just unashamedly showing us all her grief, and as a result it was deeply affecting. I think that's a lesson for Moore. Moore confuses his roles as an affected citizen, and as a filmmaker. He has his own emotional responses to his subjects, but he's weirdly private about it, choosing to channel his emotionality through his films even while he's trying to seem dispassionate and "out of the way" at the same time. So the result is that there's this sense of him being both in and out of the frame at once, and it's distracting. He needs to pick one of the two approaches. Without doing so, it's almost like he isn't taking responsibility to fully express his own feelings about the issue, so he pressures us to express his own emotions, rather than ours.
I think Moore could make an amazing artistic work exploring his own feelings about an issue, and I also think Moore could make an amazing documentary. The combination just doesn't work well for me, though. I like his emotional take on the issues, but while watching the movie, I also want there to be room for my take, too.
I think what could be an incredible documentary is a documentary about Moore, shot by someone else. Make a movie about him making his movie. Catch him in his unguarded emotional moments. I think that it's only then that people would grasp how much of a flawed hero Moore is; that he is greater than his films.