It took five separate screenings to accommodate the press demand to see Michael Moore's heavily anticipated anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, and when it came to turning up the political heat here, neither the movie nor its maker failed to disappoint.
The audience at a afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation. Festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux told the New York Times it was the longest he had ever witnessed in Cannes.
A scorching indictment of the current U.S. administration's military engagement in Iraq that colours the entire enterprise as being rooted in the Bush family's business relations with Saudi oil money and members of Osama Bin Laden's family ? and featuring some harrowing footage shot by freelance camera crews of prisoner abuse, bombed Iraqi civilians and dead-of-night military raids on Iraqi homes ? Fahrenheit 9/11 is a considerably more sober, impassioned and focused film than Moore's previous record-breaking box office documentary success Bowling For Columbine. It also features, for better or worse, considerably less Michael Moore on screen.
Following a narrative line that traces President George W. Bush's military record, business ventures, political history and pre- and post-9/11 presidency, the film meticulously lays out a deeply sinister and cynical conspiracy that ends up with powerfully graphic ? and many previously unseen ? images of dead and mutilated bodies on both sides of the current conflict.
The implication is as clear as it is unsubtle: Moore is laying the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and coalition forces right on the front steps of the White House, and purely for the purposes of economic gain.
While inescapably a partisan and flatly polemical work, Fahrenheit 9/11 makes its case meticulously and convincingly, and uses all of the pop cultural rhetorical methods that have made the director not only the most popular documentary maker of his generation, but one of the most prominent American figures lashing out against the Bush administration: He knows how to talk in the language of TV.
At one point in the film Bush is seen in the primary school classroom where he first learned of the planes being flown into the World Trade Center towers, and Moore slows the footage down so that Bush is seen to be blinking uncomprehendingly and endlessly, a child's storybook open ridiculously before him, as a counter in the corner of the screen counts out the nine minutes before the President seemed to react.
"What was he thinking?" Moore's voiceover asks. Later, he surmises what the President might have been thinking over an image of Saddam Hussein: "I think I'd better blame this guy."
Elsewhere, the plane carrying certain Bush-connected members of the Bin Laden family out of the United States on the morning of the attacks takes to the air with the Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" roars on the soundtrack.
In possibly the most emotionally powerful moment of the film, a mother who lost her son in the war goes to the White House and to be confronted by another woman who insists that all the anti-war activity going on there is just "staged."
"My son is dead," she says, tears and fury rising in her eyes. "That wasn't staged."
Certain to be divisive and controversial, and already the subject of considerable discussion concerning its troubled distribution history first with Mel Gibson's Icon Pictures (which Moore alleges dropped the film because of high-level and possibly even administration interference) and more recently the Walt Disney Company, Fahrenheit 9/11 seems expressly designed to mobilize viewers to get out and vote against George W. Bush this November.
First it needs to find distributor, however. Currently without one, Moore is nevertheless completely confident that someone will pick up the film and get it out a widely and immediately as he'd like.
He's undoubtedly right ? if as much for economic as political reasons. If Columbine was any indication, this movie could make a pile.
Yet, while Moore's insistence that "this film will open in the United States before the election" and in "shopping malls and multiplexes" instead of art houses ? he has also said he'd like to see it available on DVD by October ? he played curiously coy in the post-screening press conference when asked directly if he hoped the movie might serve to hinder President Bush's chances of re-election in November. "I just make movies I'd like to see on a Friday night," he shrugged.
It was perhaps the only question that suggested such a neutrally entertaining agenda. On every other matter, from Bush's relationship with Tony Blair ("What's Blair doing with this guy?" he asked of British journalists), to what he'd like viewers to get from the film ("I want them to be in shock and in awe") to the current climate of mainstream media silence on Iraq ("Americans do not like things being kept from them"), Moore seemed to stress both the urgency and immediacy of the movie's mission. But he wouldn't agree that the movie has been designed to vote Bush out.
Describing a relationship with the Miramax production company that allowed him to add any additional material he needed between now the release to keep the film up to date, he said he remained undecided as to whether he'd change the film to accommodate either current or future developments from Washington or Iraq. "I might, but this is a complete work."
On the issue of his own relative absence in the film ? in which he appears on screen perhaps one-fifth of the time he was on in Bowling For Columbine ? save for voiceover and general editorial point of view, Moore said, "This time I was the straight man. Bush wrote all the best lines."
"The subject just didn't need the help," he added. "Besides, a little of me tends to go along way. And sometimes less is better."
When no one stood to take issue with Moore on this point, he was asked if he planned on screening Fahrenheit 9/11 at the White House.
It was his turn to laugh. "I would love to have a White House screening," he deadpanned.
"I would attend it. And I would behave."
Seems unlikely. God knows, if there's any place where a little Michael Moore will go a long way, especially after this movie opens this summer across America, it will be in the White House.
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