Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Unmoored

When Wayne Wang released his sexually explicit The Center of the World, he marveled at how the movie's reviews served as telling x-rays of the fears and fixations of the writers.

And so far we are upon a similar Rohrshach, except in the political field, with Michael Moore's powerful, wrenching, drenching, heartfelt, ultimately patriotic Fahrenheit 9/11, a rapidfire assemblage of what the career polemicist finds most wrong in our nation's government in the almost four years since the Supreme Court decided the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush.

The early, hysterical actions by some groups to harass theater chains, such as the south's Carmike Theatres, out of showing the movie, demonstrates an unusual amount of fear. Why fret? If Moore's a charlatan, won't his lies be found out? Why would any politician fear accusations that ere not true? Why would anyone work to suppress the voices of the opposition? What would happen to our homeland if there were open political debate? The implications are monstrous!

As it turns out, Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a campaign commercial, but an indignant, mocking voice of outrage. What was the tag line for The Minus Man? "Conversation usually follows?" Moore's mockery of the Administration is hardly a fraction of the daily diet of bile produced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and other entertainers like him. Opening on almost 900 screens, with more in coming weekends if there's an audience for it, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a free-associative barrage compiling all manner of footnoted misprisions, misdirection, feats of arrogance and outright lies by politicians on both sides of the aisle, but primarily the Bush White House. It's a kaleidoscopic eyeful, as if Moore were composing his own onrushing montage of material you can find by rapidly surfing each day through advocacy sites like Daily Kos, Atrios or Whiskey Bar.

On a single viewing on deadline, there are passages where I'm at a loss as to what Moore is attempting to prove, but the cumulative impact from his tsunami of information is anger. Let a thousand footnotes bloom, I say, but don't let the facts be drowned out in critiques of Moore's personality. In fact, while Moore narrates, his face and bulk hardly ever occur on screen. (It's also important to remember that most of the loudest voices to rebuke and repress Fahrenheit 9/11 have not seen and will not see it.)

Much of the criticism, such as leveled by David Denby in the New Yorker, regards what Moore left out, rather than the damning bits and bobs that are left in. In Denby's formulation, "[Moore] never asks how the American government should conduct itself in a war against religious totalitarians."

In two hours, you can't explain the world, but ideally, the sustained dudgeon that is Fahrenheit 9/11, at the very least, can prompt enough indignation to encourage introspection and inspire honest questioning: is this really our nation? Are these really our leaders? Are they really greedy, selfish, avaricious, war-profiteering plutocrats? Are these our ideals? (Rather than saying, as fashion-forward newsreader Katie Couric did while pressuring him on the idea that he could become wealthy from his work, that Moore obviously doesn't spend his income on clothes.)

The only grievous sleight-of-hand I would knock Moore for after one viewing right before writing this piece, is his use of music and sound.  Jeff Gibbs' score partakes of the same rumbustious gloom as any old Philip Glass score, particularly the dread Glass summons for Errol Morris' documentaries. To depict the attack on the World Trade Center, he uses a montage of voices with a black screen rather than showing the carnage, as Alejandro Gonzalez-Innaritu chose to do in his near-unbearable contribution to the September 11 omnibus film. More egregious is a montage of upturned faces at Ground Zero accompanied by Arvo Part's "Spiegel im Spiegel"; in Jason Kliot's sorrowful 2002 short, "Site," which played at Sundance, scores a montage of shock-ridden faces to Part's very, very similar "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten."

Moore's third act has a heroine: Lila Lipscomb, a woman from Flint, much of whose multiracial family has served in the military, and I won't describe what happens. It is a tragic commonplace in hometowns across America in this precise moment you are reading these words. There are words that lead her to standing in front of the fortified White House: "A parent is not supposed to bury their child!" (A stranger walks into Moore's frame, immediately insisting to the camera that Lipscomb is a phony: Lipscomb responds as we all ought respond to the injustices of the world.)

Moore doesn't hate America, or soldiers, or life itself, which seems to be the line of a range of journalists who aren't otherwise occupied reviewing Bill Clinton's memoir before reading it. (Christopher Hitchens is Slate's hitman against Moore and his film, for instance.)  Moore put it this way to the ever-frightening perkiness-monster Couric on Today this week, "My film is... a silent plea to all of you in the news media to do your job. We need you. You--we--you're our defense against this. If we don't have you, what do we have? And I just think a disservice was done to the American people. You know what's great about this country? You and everyone else here gets to ask any question you want. Literally, you can ask any question you want. No one can stop you."

For journalists, filmmakers, reviewers, voters, that's true: no one can stop you.  Except yourself.

Georgia on My Mind

Wirter-director Julie Bertuccelli began as a documentarian and as an assistant director to the great directors Krzysztof Kieslowski and Bertrand Tavernier, and the sublime, tangled, bittersweet Since Otar Left... (Depuis qu'Otar Est Parti), her portrayal of three female generations of a family in post-Soviet Georgia demonstrates the kind of attentive eye and loving detail one would hope from such a background. In a tumbledown courtyard building in Tbilisi, octogenarian matriarch Eka (Esther Gorintin) passively torments her middle-aged martyr of a daughter Marian (Nino Khomassouridze) and defiant granddaughter Ada (Dinara Droukarova) with her pining for Otar, a doctor who now works as a construction worker in Paris. All three women are indelibly drawn and acted. The latter two generations have a choice to make when bad news comes: Should they hide a sudden tragedy from Eka? How can they sustain the deception? The central performance is by Polish-born actress Gorintin, past 90 and only a few years into an acting career that would be go into the annals of cinematic history for this magnificent portrait alone. To risk Roger Ebert's hyperbole for Monster, Gorintin's performance is one of the best I've seen in decades of watching movies. Bertuccelli depicts willful women as well as she measures daily life. And the ending, like the rest of this oft-hilarious, never sentimental movie, is moving, rich and complex. This is a remarkable movie.

June 26 , 2004

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