Eye to I

I HAVE ALWAYS hated the use of the "I" in most narratives. Blame "new journalism" or a culture composed of cults of personality, but it seems as if that cursed pronoun now hovers over nonfiction like some type of first-person pox. Even those hired to transmit hard facts and figures are too busy gazing inward at their reactions to be bothered. A major event is now merely grist for the author's visceral voyeurism mill; pay close, close attention to nothing but the person behind the curtain. What happened to the art of being an eloquent spectator?

If few can pull off the mixture of the personal and the professional in the realm of the written word, even fewer can make self-indulgence palatable in filmmaking. For every Ross McElwee, there are a dozen spotlight hogs convinced their every on-screen bowel movement sheds light on the human condition. Cine journalism is an elusive art as it is, straining to make sure the 24-frames-a-second (or digitized) truth is well lit and within the mic's range. When those capturing the moment start inserting themselves in front of the lens, it becomes painfully obvious where objectivity stops and egotism starts.

Two documentarians have managed to walk that fine line between righteousness and self-righteousness continually, "starring" in their own productions and somehow beating the curse of the self at its own game. There's Nick Broomfield, bent on making works as much about their own construction as their central subjects' eventual destructions. When Broomfield insinuates himself into the frame, the meta-ness of it all starts bleeding into the fabric: his walking into the wrong room, getting lost on the way to a location, recording a phone conversation in which he's told the film we are watching won't be financed are all conscious directorial decisions. It's vérité filmmaking about, well, vérité filmmaking.

And then there's Michael Moore, the fly-in-the-ointment to corporate America. In only a few films and a cult TV show, he's managed to construct an iconography that's part college-educated crusader and part blue-collar average Joe. Even when he's discussing Noam Chomsky, his slovenly look screams man of the people. But his sense of humor and an indignant anger at the sham of American democra-nomics defuse any sense of narcissism in the moviemaking muckraker's latest endeavor, Bowling for Columbine. His target in the crosshairs: the gun culture of Amerikkka, the right-wing militia mindset, even that veritable institution of freedom we call the National Rifle Association. As easy as shooting fish in a barrel, right?

The patented sense of absurdity and the situationist spectacle are there in spades (the film's opening sequence finds Moore opening an account at a Michigan bank to take advantage of a ridiculous "get a free gun" offer). But the gravity of his subject is such that Moore actually courts a balance between the subject and the active storyteller; he knows when to cut the shtick, step away from the spotlight, and let a moment resonate. Even with a penchant for heavy-handedness, he's well aware that five minutes of security-cam footage from the Columbine massacre, a sequence that's both poignant and nauseating, gets the point across more quickly than a dozen close-up-ready smirks.

The analogy of a film camera to a gun (both are filled with "ammo"; you aim them and shoot) isn't exactly revolutionary, but look at the faces of the people he confronts, film crew in tow, as he lets them roll out enough rope for their personal hanging trees; he might as well have screamed, "Stick 'em up!" There are many typical Moore moments here when the metaphorical smoking guns go off in people's faces, but the last bullet in the chamber is reserved for Charlton Heston, who consents to an on-screen interview since Moore is a "lifelong member of your NRA." Once he realizes he's being set up for the kill, Heston simply walks away ... and Moore leaves too, depositing on Heston's porch the picture of a Flint, Mich., girl murdered in a school shooting. Most filmmakers would probably have made a show of leaving their NRA card there as well. Moore leaves well enough alone. He's already made his point.

Those grace notes defuse the preaching-to-the-choir aspect of the film and serve a hunt for bigger game than the right's lunatic fringe. He's more interested in the "why" of America's cultural fear of the other; and given the cultural landscape, his timing is eerily prescient. The best thing about Bowling for Columbine may not be the sorrow or the pithiness of it but the fact that, unlike many first-person pundits, Moore doesn't consider himself an oracle. It's not about him or his process, and he's not presumptuous enough to think he has the answers to such sweeping questions – this camera "I" is just as confused and bewildered as the rest of the us.

David Fear