Rating: R
Runtine: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Director: Michael Moore
Quick Impressions:
Back in 2004 when Fahrenheit 9/11 came out, I wanted to see it but hesitated to support work so brazenly partisan, so I made a point of also watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in the theater. In my strange reasoning, paying to see one of these polarizing films made up for paying to see the other. At least, that’s what I told people. The truth is probably simpler. I like movies, and I want to see everything. For the record, I liked both films, despite their weaknesses. I was excited to practice my Latin by watching Gibson’s movie, and I loved Rosalinda Celentano as Satan. As for Moore’s film, I was curious to see disturbing footage from 9/11 for myself because I didn’t have a TV to watch as it happened.
My husband has been dying to see Fahrenheit 11/9, but I’ve been uneasy about reviewing it. (My reticence is a little silly since I’m the one who introduced my husband to Moore’s work in the first place. I love Bowling for Columbine (though I find Moore’s treatment of Charlton Heston deeply problematic given Heston’s deteriorating mental health), and we both really liked Sicko, which we saw together.)
I just hate publicly stating my own opinions about anything controversial if I can possibly avoid it. My husband and I are liberal leaning Democrats, and about ninety percent of our family members are conservative Republicans, including his parents, with whom we are close, and my parents, who live in our house (and were watching our children while we were at this movie). So….
This dynamic stresses me out. Sometimes I wonder, “How can America be so divided?” but then I think of the gulf separating our political beliefs from our parents’. Discussing such matters changes nothing. And I’ve noticed that if you challenge people’s statements on social media, they don’t question their assumptions. They just assume you are angry with them or don’t like them. (At least, that’s what I’m afraid they’ll assume. Social interactions are not my strong suit.)
“Mel Gibson hasn’t directed any outrageous movies this year,” I fretted to my husband earlier in the week (though I hear a Passion of the Christ sequel is in the works). “What can I watch to balance out Fahrenheit 11/9?”
Fortunately, on the way home from the park yesterday afternoon, my three-year-old fell asleep, and I spent a couple of hours listening to Brett Kavanaugh and the senators questioning him. After enduring that, I feel ready to review an entire Michael Moore film festival. (Seriously, the woman in the car in front of me paid for my order at Starbucks, and I think she might have done it because I looked so overwrought. I wish I had just skipped the Kavanaugh hearing and watched The Passion of the Christ again.)
The Good:
Michael Moore is clever. In this documentary, he reminds us how the press (particularly the major TV networks) were so delighted to put Donald Trump on TV to get ratings, to attract viewers. And here he uses the same technique himself.
The film’s trailers and movie posters emphasize what many people want to hear–Trump is awful. Trump might be the last president of the United States. Donald Trump spells doom for America. This is what everyone wants Michael Moore to say. (Even people who disagree want Michael Moore to say that so they can rail about what an idiot/troublemaker he is.)
But this film is not about Donald Trump. Not really. Just like everybody else, Moore is using Donald Trump to attract viewers. He begins by giving us a humorous little recap of election night, but then he abruptly shifts to, “And now that I’ve got you here, let me tell you about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.”
That’s what this movie is mainly about, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Since Moore is famously from Flint, Michigan, his interest in the subject is hardly a surprise.
Overall this documentary seems a bit less cohesive and focused than some of Moore’s work (a statement I’ll elaborate on later), but it’s hard to find fault with his treatment of Flint’s water.
Though I enjoy Moore’s work in general, I think blindly accepting all his premises would be an extremely foolhardy approach. But I do believe that his outrage over the appalling water crisis in his home town is sincere, and I applaud him for making a movie about it. Moore is not a politician, and there’s nothing he can do directly to fix the water situation in Flint. But if he can lure us to his film, he can make us look at it.
So he uses the star appeal of Trump (a figure either loved or hated by most) and he uses the horror of recent school shootings, and he touches on people’s insecurities about health insurance and not making a decent wage, and he reminds us of Hitler, and he makes us listen to the cries of a young immigrant child forcibly separated from his parents, and he even brings in a Nuremberg judge, but always, at every turn, he takes us back to Flint. Don’t forget about Flint (because all the politicians sure did once the election was over).
Now, granted, Moore has loosely constructed a thesis that justifies this emphasis on Flint. Making it sound like we all live in a society on the verge of some Gotham City nightmare reality, Moore stresses again and again that what is happening in Flint could happen anywhere in the United States. We need to stop placing blind hope in idealized politicians, trusting in them to save us. Trump is not the cause of this country’s problems. He is just a symptom. The conditions that have allowed him to come to power will continue to weaken our democratic process (perhaps fatally) unless we take matters into our own hands with grass roots activism. We need to save ourselves because all these symptoms are part of the same problem, and what happened in Flint could happen here (i.e. wherever the viewer happens to live) at any time.
Note, I’m not saying that Moore’s suggestion is wrong (necessarily), but personally, I think it’s bad enough that it’s happening in Flint. Just forget the rest for a moment. Moore’s overall argument is broadly compelling, but the case he makes about what’s happening in Flint is thoroughly convincing. And horrifying.
You know how sometimes you watch a historical drama about some great injustice and think, “I never knew about this before! How horrible! I can’t believe that happened!” I got the same feeling watching Moore’s explanation of what’s gone wrong with Flint’s water supply. And that’s a thing that’s happening right now.
The testimony of the public health worker (nurse?) who did the testing for lead poisoning is so disturbing, so damning. It honestly made me cry.
What makes me feel really stupid is the fact that I never thought about the geographical location of Flint, Michigan. I mean, I never even considered that the Great Lakes are right there, such a fantastic source of pure, fresh water. I didn’t realize that this change in the water supply happened suddenly as a result of human intervention in a system that had been working for a long time.
How Governor Snyder remains a free man mystifies me if all that Moore is saying is true. Granted, maybe this happened because people were stupid, not because they were evil. Maybe the charge of ethnic cleansing is taking things too far, but people do tend to get a bit paranoid when the government is poisoning them with lead and lying to them about it.
Moore presents such compelling testimony from Flint residents that I’m inclined to believe every single thing he says about Flint’s water supply and alarming governance. I will definitely look for more information on the subject, though.
To me, that’s the brilliance of Fahrenheit 11/9. It’s Michael Moore’s way of bringing people’s attention back to Flint.
I like very much the way that he shows how many of us reacted in horror and dismay the day after the election as if that were The Bad Thing That Happened. Then he says, “No. No. You were focused on the wrong thing. By the time that happened, this was already happening, and this, and this over here.” It’s a very interesting way to structure a documentary.
But whether or not you find his overall argument persuasive (and that’s going to be subjective), you’re not going to leave that theater without seeing (many times) what’s happening in Flint, Michigan. That’s what Michael Moore is doing. He’s showing us the crisis in Flint. The implication seems to be, “Now you do your thing, too. We all have to do something. That’s the only way to fix things. Care about your community and work to improve it. Vote. Run for office even. Make your voice heard. Save your country.”
The material about Flint is so compelling that I’m sure it will be the basis for a fictionalized Hollywood movie in the future. (If there is a future…)
Best Scene:
The most moving scene involves a politician drinking water. I won’t spoil it totally (even though it already happened) because Moore sets it up so beautifully, and the moment gives the narrative he has constructed such emotional power.
Best Scene Visually:
I like the way Moore pairs one of Trump’s speeches with images of a different speaker, though this is much too heavy-handed to be as effective as it could be if we weren’t expecting it.
Even better, really, is the way in which Moore shows us the vote totals from the Democratic primaries.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s too bad that Moore was unable to lure Governor Snyder into a face-to-face meeting. But his failed attempts to get governor Snyder to drink the water become so much more effective later when you see what he’s ultimately setting up.
I kept wondering why he showed the two scenes in which he tried to get Snyder to drink the Flint water since they were so anticlimactic. But eventually I saw. The climax comes later. Maybe he didn’t care when he couldn’t get to Snyder. Maybe he was pleased. Maybe he planned it that way from the beginning. What he shows us instead works so much better.
The Negatives:
Moore gives himself an easy job here. He doesn’t have to prove much of anything. He sets up a nightmare scenario for us and dares us to prove him wrong. (He also reminds us at the beginning of the film that he was right when he said Trump was a real threat to win the election.) Moore wants us to prove him wrong. His whole point is that we need to act in order to prove him wrong. But he also floats the idea that it might already be too late.
But back to Michael Moore. He gives himself a really easy job in this film since much of his audience is already furious and alarmed. He assembles a bunch of upsetting stuff that we already know is going on, and he trots it out in front of us. And then near the end, he makes a bold comparison between Trump and Hitler. He brings on an expert (a professor from Yale) to tell us that people make a mistake by rejecting any historical comparison that doesn’t match up perfectly. The professor says that “history doesn’t repeat,” but it does give us a wealth of examples to consider as we try to navigate the present.
So Trump does bear some similarities to Hitler. And things here could get worse just as they did in Germany. The Germans didn’t believe it could happen there just as we don’t believe it could happen here. They thought the safeguards they had in place would protect them just as we think the Constitution will protect us.
The genius of the Trump/Hitler (or Germany/US) comparison is that Moore doesn’t have to prove anything. Whether the worst comes to pass or not, the United States still has problems, and we as citizens of the United States do need to participate in our country’s governance in order to fix them.
Moore wants to tell us that when the system is breaking down, an autocrat will be able to swoop in and fill the void. But, he says, an autocrat is not the answer the people need. Believing in Donald Trump will not fix the nation’s problems. Everyone would expect Moore to say this, but he goes further and also says that believing in Barack Obama was not the answer either.
You have to admire his willingness to say to people, “Hey, just because something is comfortable/comforting doesn’t mean it is good for you.” Many people would say Trump is bad for America. Far fewer of those same people would go on to say that Obama is part of the same problem. But Moore is adamant that by becoming centrists, the Democrats and Republicans have basically become identical, and now neither party can do anything good for the people of this country. We the people have to break away from the convenience of this fetid system and begin to govern ourselves. (He’s far from the first person to say even this, though, so again, many of us watch already convinced.)
Despite what the trailer of the movie suggests, Moore doesn’t demonize Trump or even critique him that harshly. (I mean, yes, he does compare him to Hitler, but he only uses what Trump openly says about himself when describing him.) Trump is not the villain of this piece. He’s just one more symptom of a nation diseased.
Moore doesn’t demonize Hillary, either, but she doesn’t come across particularly well. Moore does say many negative things about the ineffective leaders of the Democratic party and their role in the rigged primary. And he points out that Bill Clinton’s policies were not so different from those of the Republican presidents before and after him. So while he doesn’t directly insult Hillary Clinton, he certainly doesn’t present her as a knight in white armor (or a white pantsuit) who could have saved us from this vile dragon, Trump.
The only people who do come across well are those not in power, those who have not (yet) been elected. Bernie Sanders is sympathetically portrayed, as are all the fresh faces trying to get into Congress, and the teen activists trying to make a real difference in the world.
The biggest problem with this is, of course, that we don’t know what these fresh-faced idealists will do once they actually get some real power. That male candidate in West Virginia is just delightful, so much energy, passion, focus. But maybe he’s too charismatic. What if he is the future leader of the United States, but he’s just another Trump, just another symptom of the disease? Trump 2.0 that everyone embraces. Maybe his charisma will blind us to the fact that democracy is dying for a little longer.
The thing is, Michael Moore deliberately sets this movie up so that he doesn’t have much to prove to us, and, in fact, he doesn’t prove much–except that you shouldn’t drink the water in Flint, Michigan.
All of the most dramatic flourishes in his argument are really just suggestions or assertions. He doesn’t really prove that centrism and compromise are the dirty words that he suggests. And he doesn’t really have to.
All he really has to do is remind us of all the horrible stuff going on and urge us to take action, to involve ourselves in our own governance.
Overall:
Fahrenheit 11/9 is worth a watch, especially if you hate Michael Moore and have never seen his movies. What he says here may be different than what you imagine. If you usually like Moore’s work, then you’ll probably like this, too, though it’s not too surprising and not his strongest film. My biggest takeaway is this. What is happening to the people of Flint, Michigan is an atrocity. It is awful. It is disgusting. They deserve better. We all deserve better.