Michael Moore's Patriot Act

Doing what's right, for Moore, at the moment, means one thing: unseating George W. Bush. With Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is not simply promoting a movie. He's campaigning against a sitting president. Moore turned down an offer to do a one-man show on Broadway so he could focus on the election. He plans to send film crews to Florida in November in case there's a repeat of the 2000 voting debacle. And though Fahrenheit 9/11 is the odds-on favorite for a Best Documentary Oscar, Moore is seriously considering not submitting the film for nomination so he could instead broadcast it on PBS, cable or even a network on November 1st. (Academy rules regulate as to when a nominated film can be shown on television.) Critics would certainly call the above gesture a publicity stunt. Not that Moore would disagree. He has been publicizing the film nonstop since its release, hoping to sway as many potential voters as possible.

"What I need is sleep," Moore says. "I've had no time off since Stupid White Men came out in February 2002. But we're in a precarious time. If you were in the French Resistance, would you say, 'Sorry, I need a vacation in the South of France?' "

The previous quote is a prime example of Moore as rhetorical ninja. He did not come right out and say, "George W. Bush is a Nazi." He, in fact, delivered the "vacation" part of the quote in a jokey Pepe Le Pew accent. Such tactics infuriate Moore's enemies, along with some allies. Others simply allow themselves to be vicariously thrilled.

"People who criticize him for not being a traditional documentary filmmaker are missing the point," says New York Times cultural columnist Frank Rich. "He's not trying to be the New York Times. He's an entertainer and a provocateur."

At the moment, Moore is behind the wheel of his red Chrysler minivan, giving me a tour of Davison, the little town just outside Flint where he spent his childhood. He and his wife/producer, Kathleen Glynn, a fellow Flint native, moved back to the area two years ago when their daughter started college. They still have a Manhattan apartment but now return to New York largely for work. In Davison, we drive past rolling farmland, a quaint Main Street and Moore's favorite doughnut shop.

"If you spent a day with me here," Moore tells me later, after stopping to chat with a rather portly former neighbor, "you'd see I'm the thinnest fucking guy in town!" Moore looses another hoarse cackle. Though his critics like to paint a portrait of him as a ranting lunatic, and though Moore himself can be hectoring and sanctimonious in his films, in person he's jolly in the way only men of a certain girth can be jolly, his very size screaming bon vivant.

Oddly enough, Fahrenheit 9/11 may be Moore's least provocative film. The suggestion that corporations have as great a responsibility to their employees as to their shareholders, as Moore claims in Roger and Me and The Big One, or that American society is driven by a self- destructive cycle of fear and consumption, as he insists in Bowling for Columbine, is far more radical than the central thrust of Fahrenheit 9/11. Pointing out that our Middle East policy is steered by monied interests, that the Iraq war has been a disaster and that Bush is a moron is hardly shocking. What has resonated in the film are images that most Americans never got to see in the mainstream media, whether it's Bush reading "The Pet Goat" or slick Marine recruiters targeting underclass kids in Flint or violent footage driving home the cost of war on both sides of the conflict.

"What you hear most if you're standing in the lobby, listening to people, is, 'I don't remember seeing Bush sitting there for seven minutes,' " Moore says. "That's what's shocking to people. People are like, 'Shouldn't I be seeing this stuff on TV for free? Why is a guy in a baseball cap with a high school education telling me this?' "

(Excerpted from RS 957, Sept. 16, 2004)