Movie Review: Looking For Trouble - 7th December 2002
(Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald)

Wherever you went at this year's Cannes Film Festival, one film was being discussed: Bowling for Columbine. "Columbine" as in the Columbine High School massacre. "Bowling" as in what the murderers did before they opened fire on their classmates. Film as in a mad, furious, funny documentary about America's gun culture by Michael Moore, the lumbering scourge of stupidity.

Every sequence lent itself to anecdote, from the opening scene where Moore, looking every bit the redneck, claims his free gun in return for opening an account at a Midwestern bank.

"How about that!" the Cannes crowd kept saying. What about that bit where he bails up Charlton Heston, film star and head honcho of the National Rifle Association! In his own home! They would repeat the film's lines from memory, playing out scenes as people once recited their favourite Monty Python sketches. Except Bowling for Columbine isn't about silly cheese-shop owners. It's about death and fear. It's about white America's fear of black people next door and Muslims in the next country. It is about how, on the basis of that fear, George Bush might well throw the lever marked "war". In other words, the Big Stuff.

Moore, too, was everywhere in Cannes, an overweight, regular Joe in a baseball cap talking to whoever would listen. He grew up in Flint, Michigan, a town the entire economy of which depended on the General Motors car plant. His family was Catholic and unionised. One journalist made the mistake of suggesting he was not your typical leftie. "Why?" Moore reacted angrily. "Is that a class comment? I come from the working class so my instinct, my knee jerk should be more right [wing]?"

A college drop-out, for 10 years Moore ran a weekly newspaper, The Flint Voice. A left wing paper?

"I guess so," says Moore. "We didn't use those terms in Flint."

He is now a millionaire, based in New York among the smart set, but back then he made $US99 a week. It was politics that made him a filmmaker. When GM found it could make car parts more cheaply offshore and closed the Flint factory, Moore spent a couple of years pursuing the company's chairman, Roger Smith, across the US, determined to ask him a few tough questions. The result was the 1989 documentary Roger & Me, a hilarious account of class politics that became the biggest-grossing American documentary then made.

There has been no stopping Moore since. He is good at getting noticed; he also has impeccable timing. His book, Downsize This!, tapped into a tide of public anger about soaring corporate salaries at a time of mass redundancies. A subsequent film, The Big One, followed his promotional tour for the book and focused on people with myriad small tales of decline to tell. His most recent book, Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, is a comic take on his homeland and his greatest success yet. It was scheduled to be published, in a classic example of Moore's accidental timing, on September 10, 2001.

By September 12, his publisher, HarperCollins, had decided to hold the book back a few months, the thinking being that this was not the time for a book castigating the nation's environmental destructiveness, racism and general idiocy. A few months passed and Moore rang to find out what was happening. He says the publishers demanded a rewrite, especially of the chapter called "Kill Whitey" and of his criticism of Bush ("George", reads one heading in the chapter "Dear George", "are you able to read and write on an adult level?").

The publisher also wanted Moore to put up $US100,000 ($179,000) of his own money to re-publish if he ever wanted to see it on the shelves. He tried, without success, to negotiate. The book was released in the end only because news of its suppression had spread on the internet and become something of a literary scandal.

There were no publicity tours, no chat-show appearances, no advance copies dispatched to reviewers. The idea was that the book would quietly disappear, but something else happened. Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation shot to the top of The New York Times best-seller list and stayed there, despite the fact that the liberal newspaper hasn't reviewed it. In Britain, it topped the best-seller list before it was released, thanks to internet sales. And in Australia it remained in the best-seller list for three months. Moore had become, no doubt about it, a phenomenon.

He may well also be an egomaniac, although he professes to be puzzled when he reads that: "Clearly, I am a person who suffers from a lack of ego. I mean, if I felt better about myself I wouldn't look this way." Yes, he puts himself in his films, but he says he is acting as our stand-in. "I'm just there doing what you probably would like to do and holding back from wanting to choke a few of these people."

In this way, at least, he is not a traditional leftie. He shares the American belief that, yes, one person can make a difference. In Stupid White Men he stampedes for a national holiday in honour of Rosa Parks, the black woman from Montgomery, Alabama, who became the poster girl for the civil rights movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. Parks was a brave woman, but Marxism 101 tells us that her lonely act of defiance would not have made a blip in anyone's day if the time for change had not been ripened by decades of slow struggle.

Moore rides over all that. He acts as if he can change the world by lunchtime tomorrow if he can just give it enough bluster. Forty-eight years of junk-food consumption have ensured he takes up a lot of space; our Mike is like a juggernaut, the irresistible force mowing down every reactionary in sight. "Isn't that great?" you think, with a huge sigh of relief, as you see him bearing down on the next racist lunatic or feral gun owner in his path. Go, Mikey!

At least, that's what I think. Not everyone likes his style. In Cannes, where many of the visiting Americans were corporate studio clones, Moore felt the brunt of his compatriots' disapproval. They stopped him in the street, he says, to ask him how he could be there with a movie that would suggest to outsiders all was not well in America.

It was as if Moore were personally inviting terrorists to launch another attack on America, which is a bit rich given Moore lives in New York and lost a friend in the attacks on the twin towers. He complains in Stupid White Men that the British media portrays Americans as "about as stupid as slugs", but, as he talked the press through Bowling for Columbine, you could see he was beginning to wonder about that himself. Not for long, though; his optimism, like his confidence, is irrepressible.

He puts this down to being raised a Catholic. As a Catholic, he says, all things seem unattainable, but you keep going anyway; as the lifeboat went down, he says, he would be the one trying to bail it out with a dixie cup. More powerful than this optimism, perhaps, is his certainty. Moore keeps going because he is sure he's right. "And when I'm wrong, I change my mind and then I'm right again," he says. "And I try to keep my sense of humour."

It is humour that makes his films so watchable. He is, he insists, making popcorn films. He sees himself as mainstream, so he makes films he would like to watch. "When I make a film, I'm not making it purely for political reasons. If I just wanted to do that, I'd run for office. As a filmmaker, my first contribution would just be to make a good movie that people would love to go see and leave the theatre charged with that sense of excitement that we've all had."

Most documentaries, he says, are inherently dull because they are made to a plan. When he started Bowling for Columbine he wasn't sure where it would take him. "I don't want to make a documentary saying nuclear weapons are bad; I think we all know that. Why spend two hours watching that movie? And, likewise, I would never set out to make a movie saying guns are bad because, yeah! I know that! So I never thought of doing that. But after Columbine, I thought, 'You know what? This is about an American mental problem. About our culture of fear and paranoia.'"

Somewhere in the middle of making it, too, he changed his mind about gun control. He used to think, looking at the low murder figures in Australia and other countries, that guns were the issue. Now he has changed his mind. "Here's why. You had this horrible shooting at Port Arthur. OK? You passed a very strong gun law and Australians were very proud they cut the gun murders in half. But they were only killing 120 to begin with, you know what I'm saying? To you, it's progress. To us, it's not the point. I'm agreeing with the NRA when they say guns don't kill people, people kill people: that's their slogan, right? But I would amend it. I'd say that guns don't kill people; Americans kill people.

"To look at just the guns lets us off the hook from looking at the real problems. I think what has kept your country relatively safe and sane is that you have an ethic we don't have, which is that 'if one person is hurting, we're all hurting'."

As Australian politics moves to the right, he continues, Australia will also become increasingly brutal. "You are going to have more of what we have if you continue down the road of not taking care of each other." Take that with you!, he seems to be saying. You can do it! One person can make a difference!

Moore changed his mind about gun control when he went to Canada, another country with a low murder rate. He was shocked to find that the peaceful Canadians actually own almost as many guns as Americans. This is where his presence in the frame works the way he wants. We see him being shocked; we witness Moore change his mind and become right again.

Much of Bowling for Columbine is similarly impromptu. Even the climactic interview with Charlton Heston was unplanned. Moore had been pursuing Heston through the proper channels for years. Then he simply found Heston's house on a Hollywood star map and called in on the way to the airport. He rang the doorbell and, like magic, the famous voice answered. If you look closely at the film, you can see Moore's knees shaking from shock, he says.

The humour, the wildcard approach, have done the trick once again. Bowling for Columbine has set another record for documentary audiences for Moore. "[The film's backers] can't understand it," Moore said recently. "They tried to get me to change the title. And it turns out all the predictions were wrong. And I knew that they'd be wrong, because I feel like I have a sense of where people are in the country." Most Americans, he points out, did not vote for Bush. They are worried, too, by the craziness of everything. "It's just that they got lazy."

Bowling for Columbine releases across Australia on December 26.

Links

Michael Moore official website

Bowling For Columbine official website

SMACA - Truth, Lies & Michael Moore

HardyLaw.net - Truth About Bowling

Moore Exposed

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