Conservative critics of filmmaker Michael Moore delight in pointing out his "uncomfortable" relationship with the "facts" in the stories he tells, mainly in his movies. Just look at the facts, they say, and you know he's distorting the truth. Or not telling the truth at all.
In Bowling for Columbine, for example, bankers didn't actually hand out guns in the bank. The two student shooters weren't actually in bowling class the morning of the Columbine massacre. The plant in nearby Colorado Springs didn't actually make the missiles. And in the famous Wesley Clarke-Peter Jennings flare-up in the Democratic primary debate, George W. Bush wasn't actually a deserter, by military definition, as Moore supposedly claimed.
Well let me point out that Michael Moore is not an essayist. He's not a journalist, nor is he a logician. He's a movie maker. You can hold a Joe Conason (Big Lies) factually accountable for what he writes, but that's because he is a journalist who uses reason based on facts to present what he believes to be the truth.
The same can be said of Ann Coulter, or Bill O'Reilly. Michael Moore is also concerned with truth, but his approach is different. He's not concerned with winning a debate. He wants people to see the America that he sees.
Moore sees an America where banks lure customers with the promise of free guns, where students can be in a bowling class one day and wreak violent havoc the next, where one of the biggest employers near Columbine High School is part of a vast national defense establishment manufacturing parts for nuclear missiles. Moore's America is led by a man willing to send soldiers off to war, but who in his own youth was unwilling to fight in Vietnam.
These same conservative critics are already taking shots at Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, without even having seen it. Film critics who have seen it, however, are telling a different story. They like it. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times says that what Moore has "given us is an alternate history of the last four years on the U.S. political scene... ." Desson Thomsen in the Washington Post calls it Moore's "most powerful film since "Roger & Me... ."
"What's remarkable here isn't Moore's political animosity or ticklish wit. It's the well-argued, heartfelt power of his persuasion. Even though there are many things here that we have already learned, Moore puts it all together. It's a look back that feels like a new gaze forward."
Fahrenheit 9/11 will probably win the Palm D'or at Cannes. I for one can hardly wait to see it.
UPDATE:
Here's a Frank Rich column on Farhrenheit 9/11.
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