FAHRENHEIT 9/11 Film written and directed by Michael Moore, 2004.

It’s tricky reviewing movies for a quarterly magazine. Unless you’re lucky enough to catch a preview screening just before the copy deadline you’re going to end up writing about a picture that everybody’s seen or missed already. Michael Moore’s blistering polemic against US corporate and political greed, corruption and dishonesty in general, and George Bush jnr.’s in particular, is important. As in his books, and his previous movies, Michael Moore’s mission is to make us question what politicians tell us, to analyze their motives, to investigate their intentions. That’s a very proper thing to do. Good for Michael Moore! I feel obliged, however, to issue a caveat. Just as we should never, unquestioningly, accept what a politician asks us to believe, so we should never, unquestioningly, accept what a political commentator asks us to believe. I’m sure that Mr. Moore himself would not deny that he has a pretty big axe to grind. Politicians can be ‘economical with the truth’ – they emphasize the points that lend credence to their arguments and gloss over – or suppress, even – those that don’t. So does Mr. Moore. What you get in this movie is, I suspect, largely the truth, but it isn’t the whole truth and it certainly isn’t nothing but the truth.
    Consider this: Michael Moore is a man who has made a fortune out of exposing the evils of capitalism. He rages against the illiberalism of a government that guarantees him the right so to do – so how courageous is that? People stand and applaud at the end of this movie, but that’s precisely what the movie should have encouraged them not to do. They’re being uncritical; they’re not thinking. Michael Moore offers no alternative to the absolute acceptance of his argument: he who is not with him is against him. He’s a bit of a bully, but he allows us to ridicule those who we perceive to be The Powerful, which is always enjoyable especially if they’re the prefects, the Republicans, the Jews or the Freemasons… Oops. See the film. As I said at the beginning, it’s important, because it demonstrates that we live in a free society; one that allows people like Michael Moore to make movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 and us to go see them. That’s not actually the point that Michael Moore is trying to make, but it’s an important one, isn’t it?
    Andrew Montgomery