Also this issue:

What Nobody Expects
A startling film combines the talents of two filmmakers.
-Cindy Fuchs

Home on the Range
Bowling for Columbine may be scattershot, but it hits plenty of targets.
-Sam Adams

Adam's Crib
Adam Sandler plays a manchild (again), but troubled (for once), and gives P.T. Anderson a boost.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

October 17-23, 2002

movies

Michael Moore

by Sam Adams

Michael Moore has carved out an identity as the P.T. Barnum of the American left, mixing progressive politics and a flair for media pageantry. But while it might warm a lefty’s heart to see Moore’s Stupid White Men shoot up the bestseller lists and stay there (Harper Collins tried to kill this assault on the Bushies after Sept. 11), Moore’s showboating methods, while effective on a case-by-case basis, have often oversimplified the problems he’s decrying. In order to provide a face-to-face confrontation of the sort that is Moore’s stock-in-trade, it helps to pretend that the evil corporation in question really is run by an individual, a ruse whose falsehood is surely clear to someone as savvy as Moore.

Though Bowling for Columbine climaxes with a pair of such confrontations -- one with executives from Kmart, who sold the ammunition used in the Columbine massacre; one with Charlton Heston, the head of the NRA -- the movie is the first of Moore's to admit that problems surmount individuals' attempts to affect or even understand them. Bowling's subject is the American propensity for violence, an evil which has no perpetrator, and Moore is acutely aware of the fact that he's asking his audience to come along on a very different sort of journey. "It's very easy, when I look back now, to have the antagonist be [General Motors CEO] Roger Smith, or [Nike's] Phil Knight, or the HMO on our TV show [The Awful Truth]," he said during the Toronto Film Festival, a few days shy of the Sept. 11 anniversary. "In this [movie], who's the antagonist? It's us! So what am I going to do? I'm going to beat up the audience for two hours -- ŒYou're the problem, you're the Roger Smith now?' It was a very hard movie to make, because I'm essentially talking about sort of a socio-psychological issue in a film. And I want you to eat Goobers!"

Moore's voice rises frequently in an interview with a half-dozen journalists -- at times, he's almost yelling. You're reminded, despite Moore's affable, cap-wearing persona (today, it's a UCLA hat), how much of his work stems from anger, and how much the humor serves to tone that anger down. If Moore's not newly sanguine, though, he's learned enough to back off that anger and redirect his judgments -- at least until a more appropriate target can be found. Bowling begins with the obvious solution to violent deaths -- gun control -- but moves beyond it into far muddier waters. "I started off with the typical liberal viewpoint: If only we had less guns, more gun control laws, we'd have less violence," Moore says. "And then I got into making the film, and it became clear to me that that wasn't the answer."

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Bowling casts about in many directions looking for answers -- Moore deadpans, "You gotta admit I've thrown a lot at you in two hours" -- and it breaks Moore's self-imposed rule that his movies not run more than 90 minutes. The result, he says, "is my statement on where America is at in 2002." And if the picture is bleak, it needn't stay that way. "I think as Americans, we're better than what you see on the screen," Moore says animatedly. "Things do get better. Slavery ends, Hitler dies -- the bad guys usually lose in the end. I cannot allow myself to sink into my own despair over this -- the humor is there as a release for the depression, because if you leave the theater depressed, you're paralyzed. I want you to leave the theater angry, and feeling like you better do something. I'm trying to push your citizen button, to say, ŒThis is a democracy -- this is not a spectator sport.' If the people don't participate, it doesn't exist."