Cannes — Michael Moore lit the powder keg he promised at the Cannes Film Festival: His incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11 riled and discomposed audiences Monday with a relentless critique of the Bush administration in the post-Sept. 11 world.
If Moore can get the movie into U.S. theatres this summer as planned, the title Fahrenheit 9/11 could become a rallying cry for Democratic voters in the fall election between President George W. Bush and opponent John Kerry.
The movie reiterates other critics' accusations about the Bush family's financial connections to Saudi oil money and the family of Osama bin Laden. Moore also repeats others' condemnations that the White House was asleep at the wheel before the Sept. 11 attacks, then used fear-mongering of future terrorism to muster support for the Iraq war.
Yet Moore — the provocateur behind the Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine, which dissected American gun culture — applies his trademark satiric outrage to the Sept. 11 debate, packaging his anti-Bush message in a way that provokes both laughs and gasps.
Even skeptics of Moore, who draws criticism that he skews the truth to fit his arguments, were impressed.
"I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore's work. There's no such job as a standup journalist," said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix, who saw the movie at a press screening before its official Cannes premiere.
Yet in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore presents powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families, Rocchi said.
"This film is at its best when it is most direct and speaks from the heart, when it shows lives torn apart," Rocchi said.
Moore still is arranging for a U.S. distributor. Miramax financed the movie, but parent company Disney blocked the release because of its political overtones.
In the days before Cannes, Moore's Disney criticism whipped festival audiences into a fever for Fahrenheit 9/11. Hollywood cynics called it the usual P.T. Barnum showmanship by Moore, but when the movie finally unspooled, it earned resounding applause at Monday's press screenings.
"You see so many movies after they've been hyped to heaven and they turn out to be complete crap, but this is a powerful film," said Baz Bamigboye, a film columnist for London's Daily Mail. "It would be a shame if Americans didn't get to see this movie about important stuff happening in their own backyard."
Fahrenheit 9/11 seems assured of U.S. release, however. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein are trying to buy back the film and find another distributor, with Moore hoping to have it in theatres by Fourth of July weekend.
Harvey Weinstein showed up outside the Cannes theatre after the first Fahrenheit 9/11 screenings. He declined to speak at length, but as reporters asked if the film would be released, he said, "Have I ever let you down?"
The film takes its title from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which refers to the temperature needed to burn books in an anti-Utopian society. Moore calls Fahrenheit 9/11 the "temperature at which freedom burns."
Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with a whimsical recap of the 2000 presidential campaign and the rancour after Florida's photo-finish vote threw the election to Bush over Democratic rival Al Gore.
"Was it all just a dream?" Moore ponders. "Did the last four years even happen?"
The movie characterizes Bush's first eight months in office as a prolonged holiday for a potential "lame-duck president," backed by the Go-Go's tune Vacation.
The Sept. 11 attacks play out with no images of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center or damaged the Pentagon. Instead, Moore fades to black and provides only the sounds of the planes crashing into the towers, before fading in again on tearful faces of people watching the devastation and a slow-motion montage of floating ash and debris after the buildings collapsed.
Moore examines Saudi financial ties to the Bush family and presents post-Saddam Iraq as an economic-development zone for American corporations.
Graver in tone than Bowling for Columbine, the film includes grisly images of dead Iraqi babies and children burned by napalm, along with amputees and other U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq.
Fahrenheit 9/11 revisits Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose economic distress after General Motors plant closings was the subject of his first film, Roger & Me.
Moore talks with Lila Lipscomb of Flint during her daily routine, hanging an American flag in front of her house. He returns later as Lipscomb heart-wrenchingly reads the final letter from her son, Michael Pedersen, killed in action in Iraq.
Her patriotism turned to bitterness against the federal government, Lipscomb journeys to Washington, D.C. Near the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, Lipscomb stands before the White House and says, "I finally have a place to put all my pain and anger."
