The Trouble With Michael Moore

Posted on Sunday February 21, 2010, 09:00 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States

On most things that matter, I agree with Michael Moore. I think that mass gun ownership is more likely to produce social harm than social good. I think the provision of universal health care is a moral issue and private health care is just horrific. I think - stop me if I'm too controversial here - Bush was a bad President and some bankers deserve a good slap upside the head. I really, really wish I could sing Moore's praises to the heavens for his films tackling these subjects, but the damn movies make it impossible.

While I’m willing to give most of Bowling for Columbine and sections of Sicko a pass, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Capitalism: A Love Story are two of the biggest missed opportunities in modern cinema history. For the love of Zeus, the former was targeted at George W. Bush; the latter at the fricking banking industry, in 2009! There are no bigger sitting ducks, and yet Moore wandered in, scattered buckshot wildly in all directions and missed the damn duck*. It's very nearly unforgiveable.

Now I know that Moore is a polemicist rather than a true documentarian, really; I know that he aims to tug the heartstrings of a mass audience rather than intellectually convince a few (probably a few who are already leaning in his direction, at that). But he is by far the highest-profile documentary filmmaker working today, and with great power should come great responsibility. 

If an Alex Gibney or a Davis Guggenheim had made Fahrenheit 9/11, we might have seen a film worthy of standing ovations at Cannes. In fact, Gibney kind of did: his Taxi to the Dark Side meticulously builds a portrait and history of "enhanced interrogation" techniques that came to be used at Guantanamo Bay and in Abu Ghraib. It may build more slowly than Fahrenheit and feature fewer uses of pop music; it may not go far enough up the chain of command, but it's ultimately a much more powerful and, yes Mr Moore, emotional film. While Moore casts wildly about himself, leaping between dark conspiracy theories about the Bushes' relations with Saudi bigwigs and stunt attempts to persuade congressmen and women to enlist their children in the armed forces and animated interludes, Gibney (and other filmmakers) choose a topic, focus on it with some degree of intellectual rigour, research it to death, talk to people who know something and present a film that's much more convincing. It may be narrower in focus than Fahrenheit attempted to be, but it's all the more powerful for that.

Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room presents a much more damning portrait of modern capitalism than Moore manages - and that was made several years before the crash made it all too apparent that the same venal greed that had undermined Enron had pervaded the entire system.  Moore wastes time talking about "dead peasant" insurance (policies taken out by companies on their employees that allowed them, in some cases, to profit from that employee's death), something that's been investigated before and has been largely obsolete for years, and then presents tear-jerking interviews with people being turfed out of their homes by uncaring banks without explaining, really, what lies behind those evictions. It's possible to make polemics that build a case much more thoroughly than this - consider The End of Poverty? for an example, or The Age Of Stupid, or Silhouette City or of course An Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps Moore might consider swapping the endless shots of himself looking sympathetic / cod-shocked for some actual structure.

Moore keeps going off on little tangents that suggest he'd be better returning to a serial form like TV Nation, rather than trying to stitch largely incoherent pieces into a two-hour film. Then he could do a half-hour on dead peasant policies, another on workers staging a sit-in, another on the tactics of sheriff's departments in evictions, another on the passing of the bailout act in Congress and another on what it is that bankers actually do. But when he tries to cram all of these into one film he flails about and weakens his own case. 

Given reality's well-known liberal bias (© Stephen Colbert) and the news media's lack of the willingness to look at anything in any real depth**, great documentaries in cinema are an important niche. We need high-profile films like this out there. Heck, we need Michael Moore, with his flair and his lightning-rod ability to attract controversy. I just wish he'd would try a little harder for greatness.

*There's some sort of irony in using a hunting metaphor right after talking about Bowling for Columbine, I know.

**To quote, probably unwisely, a current Observer ad, "now more than ever, it's important to have papers not owned by right-wing billionaires".