Sloppy, scattergun rhetoric and stunts not worthy of Borat
Fahrenheit 11/9
15 cert, 128 mins
Dir Michael Moore
In 2004, Michael Moore’s cry of despair against the Bush administration in Fahrenheit 9/11 turned into an honest-to-god conflagration. Fahrenheit 11/9 is a sequel of sorts, choosing for its own titular date the fateful night of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, and turning the full force of Moore’s scattergun rhetoric against the horrors America has suffered since.
This isn’t only an anti-trumpian screed. The Democrats come under heavy fire as well, especially the party wranglers who relentlessly favoured Hillary in the primaries over Bernie Sanders; Obama, meanwhile, is by no means afforded a shining record. But the blunt, butt-end of the film is mainly shoved at Trump, for his campaign’s grim opportunism and sinister drifts towards despotism since taking office.
Moore is no stranger to preaching to the converted, but the volume level on his sermonising here is way up, and the punchlines are frequently too hoarse to connect properly. An extended analogy between Trump and Adolf Hitler ploughs down a lengthy checklist of legitimate comparison points, but still manages to seem horribly pleased with itself. Not even the talking head that Moore defensively wheels on to reassure us “comparisons are never perfect” inoculates him successfully from smugness.
Structurally, this film’s all over the parish, tending to see-saw between sarcastic/despairing overview – scored, inevitably, to the likes of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries – and unctuous trips to Moore’s Michigan heartland, where his much-vaunted empathy with the common man congeals into treacle and platitudes. “Sometimes the bravest people are the ones you least expect,” he coyly declaims about some teachers, patronising viewer and subjects alike.
Detailing his hometown’s water crisis, caused in 2014 when the federal government switched sources to the inadequately treated Flint River, he then wastes time on the pointless gag of driving a tanker up to a culpable senator’s mansion and hosing down his front garden. Considering everything Sacha Baron Cohen has got away with since Borat, this kind of stunt seems all the more thuddingly lame.
Much in Moore’s analysis is hard to disagree with, but this doesn’t make it automatically valuable. Sharp points go astray, lost in the sloppy tirade. It’s icky, too, watching him pal around with the student activists spawned by the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, whose own brand of urgent, articulate response shows Moore’s whole game up to be past its prime.
Perhaps the unexpected ascendancy of Trump is simply no laughing matter – there are precious few zingers hitting home on this occasion. Or maybe what’s demanded by Moore’s one-man leviathan hunting is a less rusty set of harpoons.