Will Fahrenheit 9/11 help George lose the election – or win it?

By B. Ruby Rich

MICHAEL MOORE'S LATEST opus, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the pinnacle of his career to date. That's the good news, and that's the bad news. It's his most mature film, a breakout performance on all fronts, saturated with his signature elements. Alas, that's not necessarily a good thing for a film that has announced its intentions well in advance of its opening: to nail this administration to the wall and move people to reject it at the polls in November. How down I am with that goal. And how downcast I am that Moore hasn't made the right film for the job, at least to my eyes.

The debut ad says it all: a full-page, presumably digitally constructed photo of Moore and George W. Bush holding hands and beaming. "Controversy ... what controversy?" the ad copy asks. Moore's talent – er, obsession – for personalizing all his issues couldn't be clearer. That's his strength and his weakness. In a United States rendered stupid by a gutted educational system and tabloid television, where issues can't be understood unless there's a huckster to parse them in five-letter words, where being smart or sophisticated is suspect (thus Kerry's attempt to hide his knowledge of, gasp, French), personality rules. In fact, it's the only rule.

Moore is nothing if not a man of personality, just the sort Republicans would love to back if only he'd change his politics. And Moore's a blunt rhetorician, able to manipulate his subjects as smoothly as the GOP manipulates the millions of Americans who keep voting it into power. But Republicans pull their strings in private, behind closed doors; however humorless, they build institutions and foundations and an ever broader spectrum of support. Moore builds his own brand, collecting awards, playing to his fans, deploying sarcasm like a smart bomb, and using his bulky persona for direct confrontation. He's good at all of it. It's an effective but effectively limited strategy. If he had his own political organization, maybe he'd be able to pick judges and ambassadors and call off wars; as it is, he picks his targets, strikes, then chuckles at his own smarts. He makes us feel good, superior, in the right. Audiences applaud, then leave the theater, and it's over.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is too important to fail. This summer, as the back pages of select newspapers fill up with ever increasing stories of governmental deception and corruption and as Bush and co. continue their corporate blood-and-guts rampage around the world, we desperately need a tonic to keep us going. I thank Moore for dispensing Geritol to a tired left. But I want more: I want the smoking gun I somehow believed Fahrenheit 9/11 would produce.

To be sure, there's a lot there: Bush continuing to read a storybook to schoolchildren on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after learning what had just happened; marines prowling down-market shopping malls to talk poor African American teenagers into enlisting; U.S. soldiers viewing Iraq as a video-game version of reality TV with customized soundtracks; and much more. Moore has honed his stand-up routines too, and he uses them sparingly. My favorite is his gambit to boost military enrollment by standing outside Congress and trying to get its members to sign up their kids.

Two sections stand out from the herd. One is a portrait of a mother who's a patriotic war supporter until her son dies in Iraq; when his letter arrives posthumously to condemn this government's stupidity, she undergoes a change of heart and a profound political shift. Moore clearly offers her as a figure of identification for the heartland: follow her example, the film seems to say. But how?

Another crucial section uses hard research to trace George W.'s buddy from his National Guard days and paint the larger picture of Bush family business ties to Saudi oil interests. Moore's editorial team crafts an impressive montage that rounds up facts and suspicions. We even learn that the board of directors of the Carlyle Group was meeting on the morning of Sept. 11, allowing the company to capitalize on arms investments with zero delay. A solid synthesis, yet it can't connect the dots. We don't get an argument or marshaling of facts sufficient to prove a chain of command. Instead, Moore relies on innuendo and the persuasive power of his montage.

It's not good enough. He has to catch the Bushes (and Cheney and Halliburton, for that matter) red-handed. When he doesn't, he tries to compensate by playing into popular prejudices toward Arabs – every time somebody pops up on-screen in a robe, he's an evil Saudi. When he wants to expose the idiocy of the "coalition of the willing," Moore relies on stock footage full of stereotypes to ridicule the partners. When issues don't track easily across the game board, they're left out: nothing about Haiti, nothing about Kerry.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is most powerful as an antiwar film, and that's no mean feat. It's also brilliant at conveying the administration's manipulation of Sept. 11 to terrorize and control the American public. It's a film that will fire up its audiences and help viewers transform depression into rage. But it's ultimately lazy and juvenile. What it won't do, alas, is move people to vote. Democrats fade into the woodwork, a joke that's not quite so funny.

I wanted a campaign jingle of a documentary, but I didn't get it. Further, given how quickly Moore's not-smoking guns are being upstaged by daily revelations, he's going to have to produce weekly updates to stay current. Hmm. We now inhabit an era of such extreme corporate control and government censorship of the media that books have become the new journalism and documentaries have become the modern news programs. With headlines touting video on demand and broadband down-streaming, it's just possible Moore could perform an end run around his failed television career and become a one-man network-studio-Web site, issuing bulletins to the faithful. He would make a lot of people feel better, but unless he changed his tactics, he wouldn't stop Bush's reelection.

If Moore actually wants to see Bush evicted from the White House, he may have to sacrifice his own brand enhancement, personality shilling, and box-office massages. More than 30 years ago, a filmmaker by the name of Jerry Bruck made documentary history with a film about a courageous muckraker. It was called I.F. Stone's Weekly, and it introduced the man (the brother of San Francisco film critic Judy Stone) who trolled the public record for incriminating details, then linked them up in a weekly report he sent out to a list of subscribers. It was one of the first documentaries to play theatrically, and it was a hit. Stone was a modest man with immodest ambitions: to skewer the thieves at the top by hoisting them on their own petards.

Moore could update his example and ride to the rescue, churning out the attack ads the Democrats can't seem to produce, funneling whistle-blowing data buried by Republican conservatives into a tornado of accusation, and finding a way to move the American people to discover a conscience once again. If only I could imagine Moore doing any such thing. Fahrenheit 9/11 is what we have instead. Go see it and clap. Just don't expect too much.