FAHRENHEIT 9/11

Despite its title, documentarian Michael Moore's new film FAHRENHEIT 9/11 takes on far more than the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001. Nothing if not ambitious, Moore encompasses related incidents, both before and after, including footage of and commentary on everything from the hotly debated 2000 elections to President Bush's decision to continue to read a storybook to children (seen here in video footage) in a classroom after he gets the news about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11 to relatively recent casualties (often shown graphically) on both sides in Iraq.

Moore's droll, quizzically deadpan narration gives FAHRENHEIT a satirical tone that makes its starker points a little easier to assimilate.

Moore's overall point is that the current U.S. administration, led by President Bush, is (to put it very mildly) doing a bad job of running the country and that a number of officials, including President Bush, have so many ties to foreign businesses and governments, particularly the Saudi oil conglomerates, that their loyalties are questionable. Moore also goes on to illustrate the effects of some policies on American citizens, from a cookie-munching pacifist group in Fresno that is put under surveillance by a government infiltrator to the agony of a Michigan woman who loses her eldest son in Iraq. The examination of the mother's grief, and the physical and emotional suffering of Iraqi civilians, is intense (very sensitive viewers should be aware that the footage includes shots of grievous wounds).

There is an impressive amount of variety of footage here the aforementioned classroom visit, U.S. troops in combat situations, the President at a fundraising event and on fishing trips, even Al Gore presiding over a session that formally closes the door on the possibility of the Florida vote going in his favor. Mercifully, Moore does not include the excruciating and by now familiar footage of the planes hitting the towers he prefers to show us what we probably haven't yet seen.

Moore tries to get so much in that it's a little dizzying by the end, but he certainly gets across the concept that the government's actions past and present have enormous impact on not only the obvious (the lives of U.S. military personnel and their families and the lives of civilians in countries where the U.S. sends in military force), but also things we wouldn't normally hear about. He also implies some things that remain unstated, but what is on the record here is eye-widening, such as the U.S. government flying 24 members of the bin Laden family out of the U.S. by Sept. 13, 2001, when regular air traffic was still grounded in the wake of the bombings.

How one views the film will of course be colored by the perspective one has going in. People who support President Bush will likely be offended; people who agree with Moore overall may feel that perhaps he doesn't go far enough. People somewhere in the middle are likely to find it educational. FAHRENHEIT 9/11 is a provocative document of our times that packs an enormous amount of information into two hours it isn't all-inclusive, but it manages to be both incendiary and fairly comprehensive, two qualities that don't often go together.