Fahrenheit 11/9 film review: Michael Moore’s latest documentary is a brash left-wing polemic but its passionate punches still land
The same debate has been swirling around Michael Moore’s documentaries for 30 years. From his first film Roger & Me, about General Motors’ abandonment of his hometown Flint, Moore’s formula has remained largely unchanged: brash left-wing polemic, spiced with stunts and gags. To his fans, he’s a gifted ironist with a cause. To his critics, he’s a blatant propagandist in bad clothes.
Moore’s strength is that he knows he’s both. Fahrenheit 11/9 is marketed as a takedown of Donald Trump (the title refers to the date of his election). Cue Hitler juxtapositions and montages of weeping liberals set to Mozart’s Requiem. Yet the Trump scenes merely bookend a complex, messy narrative about the failure of America’s democracy. Moore whisks us through myriad scandals in his nation’s recent history, some of which barely relate to its current president. He takes big leaps of logic and bends facts like Uri Geller; he swings between high moral seriousness and deadpan silliness with practised ease.
What emerges from his scattergun approach is a paean to grassroots activism. Moore meets teachers rallying for a pay rise, survivors of the Stoneman Douglas school shooting, and victims of a water sanitation crisis in his hometown. Flint is a city with a fine tradition of protest, and a more disciplined filmmaker might have focused on this underreported story. Moore gives us a quick rundown. True to form, he attempts a citizen’s arrest of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder. Then he moves on.
In Slacker Uprising, Moore toured the nation before the 2004 presidential election, encouraging the young to vote. His message here is less clear. It spotlights rising Democratic stars but bemoans the party’s tilt to the right. We are reminded, rather late on, that the Flint water scandal happened on Barack Obama’s watch, with a segment dedicated to the then-president’s bungled response. Disillusioned with the political class, the Moore of 2018 calls on Americans to fight Trumpism outside of the electoral system.
Coming weeks before the midterm elections, this is a provocative position. Moore argues it passionately, even when he isn’t quite making sense. He only interviews people who agree with him, and in his narration he swears with dismay. This is filmmaking at its most honest, acknowledging what is true of all documentaries: that they convey a viewpoint rather than objective truth. Fans will love it, critics will loathe it, and little will change.