Hope exists only if citizens are involved
ists declaring there was no way Clinton could lose the election and no chance at all of a Trump win.
As Moore seeks to answer the “WTF?” question, not always seriously, he may surprise viewers by arguing there’s more than one villain in this twisted tale — and at least a couple of the baddies are people you’d likely never suspect. Trump is indeed a very bad president, he says, but “Donald Trump didn’t just fall from the sky.”
Complacency on the part of regular people and political parties, along with complicity by ratings-hungry media, contributed to a slide in societal values and a thirst for sensation that led to the elevating of The Apprentice’s showboating TV star to the most powerful job in the world.
The film displays damning statistics: 63 million ballots in the popular vote for Clinton, 60 million for Trump and another 100 million potential votes which were never cast, for a variety of reasons, and which could have changed history had they been cast.
Moore posits the amusing theory — one that actually isn’t completely far-fetched, know- ing Trump’s penchant for oneupmanship — that pop star Gwen Stefani is to blame for the carrot-topped egotist’s bid for the presidency.
Trump, the theory goes, found out that Stefani was getting paid more for episodes of The Voice than he was for The Apprentice, and he tried to call NBC’s bluff with a presidential bid that would prove his popularity and force NBC to pay him more money. A couple of ecstatic public rallies later, Trump decided he was seriously in the game, although Moore argues that, deep down, the man never really wanted to be president.
Part 2 of Fahrenheit 11/9 arrives with an abrupt segue about 40 minutes into this twohour doc, switching from Trump’s antics to the trauma of Flint, Mich., Moore’s hometown. The auto-building city has suffered mightily from abandonment by General Motors and by degradation of the local water supply, the latter due to a monumentally foolish decision by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican crony and pal of Trump’s.
Snyder disconnected Flint’s water from the safety of Lake Huron and switched it to the toxicity of the Flint River, a cost-cutting move his officials tried to downplay and also cover up, even as the water was poisoning thousands of adults and children. Moore’s film introduces us to a whistle-blower in the bureaucracy who refused to falsify test results that showed sky-high levels of lead in many Flint residents.
But perhaps the most shocking “villain” whom Moore calls out is former president Barack Obama, who is seen visiting Flint and blithely accepting Snyder’s claim that the city’s water is now safe to drink (it’s not, even today). Obama is twice seen pretending to drink from glasses of Flint water, but he actually barely sips them, and he blithely accepts Snyder’s assurances, much to the fury of Flint residents interviewed afterward.
Enraged by what happened to his hometown, Moore chooses an amusingly cathartic gesture: he fills a tanker truck with Flint water and drives to Snyder’s mansion, where he proceeds to spray its contents onto the governor’s lawn and driveway.
This then leads to the scattershot third section of the film, the weakest of the three, in which Moore yields to bad humour — a lip-synching comparison between Trump and Hitler is as obvious as it is overdone. But it’s also here that we get signs of a popular uprising against the many ills that plague America and the world.
Moore visits with surviving students of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. earlier this year, who have now become vocal advocates for gun control. He talks to West Virginia teach- ers who defied their own union and went on strike for better pay and benefits — but also demanding that education be a bigger priority for the state. Moore also sees welcome signs of diversity in the Democratic party and in voter preference. He congratulates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rookie politician of Puerto Rican heritage who defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York City congressional primary vote last June. Moore also salutes Rashida Tlaib, the first Muslim-American woman to serve in the Michigan state legislature.
A movie that begins as a “WTF?” lament about Trump ends with hope for the future — but only, Moore persuasively insists, if citizens everywhere pay attention and get involved.