‘Fahrenheit 11/9’: Moore’s still fuming
Fahrenheit 11/9 Rated: R for language and some disturbing material/images. Running time: 126 minutes.
out of 4
Just in time for the midterm elections, Michael Moore presents “Fahrenheit 11/9,” his scream of rage against President Trump and all he stands for. The leftist gadfly has worked himself into quite a state — he’s also hopping mad at Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.
Given the level of polarization in the country, the film is unlikely to change anybody’s mind about anything. It’s aimed squarely at Moore’s progressive audience, and the filmmaker feels free to get downright incendiary: At one point, he shows us footage of Hitler delivering a speech, but the voice we hear is Trump’s.
We’re also treated to newsreel images of the Reichstag fire, an arson attack in 1933 on the parliamentary building in Berlin, the Reichstag, which Adolf Hitler used to play upon public and political fears to consolidate power, setting the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany.
Moore opens with a nicely assembled sequence showing media types and ordinary citizens reveling in their conviction that Clinton will win the 2016 election. There’s much wailing and many tears shed after the vote is counted. (Moore himself was dismayed but not surprised — before the election, in defiance of the polls, he wrote an article headlined “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.”)
The director’s brief against Trump is simple: the president, he says, is a racist, sexist proto-fascist, with violence-prone supporters and some very disturbing habits. (We see multiple photos of him with his hands on his daughter Ivanka.) Trump has “always committed his crimes in plain sight,” Moore says.
The film then takes a swerve to Michigan, where Moore sets his sites on Gov. Rick Snyder, who was strongly backed by Trump, and his mishandling of the issue of lead pollution in the water of Flint, a subject that the director has addressed before.
This brings out the devil in Moore, and we see him pulling off two of his patented political stunts: Equipped with handcuffs, he tries (and fails) to make a citizen’s arrest of Snyder. Then he ups the ante, getting behind the wheel of a tanker truck full of Flint’s poisoned water, which he proceeds to spray at the governor’s mansion.
There are other threads that only involve Trump tangentially, at best. One involves the February killings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which inspired a nationwide protest, and a flurry of student activism, against lax gun-control laws. (This is also among Moore’s ongoing concerns — he treated it in 2002’s “Bowling for Columbine.”) Another is the West Virginia teachers’ strike earlier this year, which also had national repercussions. These are among the movie’s strongest sequences.
Moore rips Obama for, among other issues, using the Flint water crisis as a photo op. He views Hilary Clinton as a symptom of how the inner circle of the Democratic Party has thwarted the voters’ wishes. Bill Clinton gets raked over the coals for pushing the party toward the center.
If there’s a goal here besides demonizing Trump, it’s to press Moore’s notion that, despite many election outcomes, Americans broadly support progressive and liberal causes. He offers poll results (ironic!) to back him up. The only solution, he believes, is the undoing of the current political system — otherwise the big-money establishment will remain in charge of both parties. He finds a few notes of hope, such as the Florida student activists, who have scored some victories.
Moore can be abrasive, but he doesn’t care. The point of “Fahrenheit 11/9” is to rally the troops, who, I’m guessing, remain plentiful even if his reputation for veracity has taken a few hits over the years. Less partisan viewers may find the film quite long, and not a lot more than a rehash of political obsessions Moore has recounted in many previous movies. If you know that work, you’ll find no surprises here.
The film’s title, by the way, is a takeoff on “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore’s 2004 broadside against President George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq that became the highest grossing documentary ever.