Also this issue:

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

Michael Moore
-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

Home on the Range

Bowling for Columbine may be scattershot, but it hits plenty of targets.

by Sam Adams

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Michael Moore, even if, or especially if, you agree with his politics. Moore specializes in political theater, but often at the expense of his putative subject, and to the glory of -- Michael Moore. His signature stunt of striding into corporate headquarters and demanding to see top executives may produce dramatic visuals, but it doesn’t actually prove much. He loves the momentary spectacle, but his record on follow-up isn’t great, to say nothing of his willingness to trim the truth to fit an easy argument.

That's what makes Bowling for Columbine such a surprise: it's not afraid to ask questions it doesn't know the answers to. Calling it disorganized or inconclusive misses the point; Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can't be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Ranging all over the place, both physically and thematically, Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore, an NRA member and former child marksman, pushes past that answer; Canada, he points out, has more guns per household, although nothing remotely approaching our gun deaths. (Nor do they give guns away free when you open a bank account, as one stateside depository does in a hilarious and baffling opening scene.)

Moore points fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we're more violent than we actually are (and so encourages people to respond thusly to threats). He goes to Columbine, and to Littleton, interviewing people from Marilyn Manson to South Park's Matt Stone -- who, with his account of growing up bullied in Colorado, emerges as the movie's voice of reason -- to NRA President Charlton Heston. The man who played Moses fumbles when asked why the NRA held a rally in Colorado shortly after the Columbine massacre, and blames the U.S.'s rate of violence on "ethnic mixing." (Chalk it up to Heston's "Alzheimer's-like symptoms" if you like, but as one commentator has pointed out, he looks pretty stable out there campaigning with George W. Bush.) Bowling is a sprawl, it's true, but it's ambitious, not confused.