Michael Moore made himself famous with his first documentary, Roger & Me, a devastating look at how GM singlehandedly destroyed his hometown of Flint, MI. (SPOILER ALERT: Don't watch if you love rabbits). Since then, Moore has brought his schlubby blue collar persona and wry sense of despair and moral outrage to address some of the biggest issues of our time, to greater or lesser effect (your mileage may vary). Whether you love Michael Moore or hate him tends to accord with your
personal ideology, but his skill as a filmmaker can't really be questioned. He basically invented the modern political documentary
Also, he made the video for Rage Against the Machine's best song (IMHO), so he's got that going for him:
In our thirty-first film, Moore takes on America's obsession with guns. Ostensibly inspired by the worst act of school violence in our history (well, at least, prior to the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary), Bowling for Columbine asks over and over again: what is it about America and Americans that makes us kill each other with guns at such incredibly high rates?
I say "ostensibly" because while the movie is framed as if it's about Columbine and what caused it, Moore spends precious little time considering that particular tragedy. There is a haunting and powerful segment featuring surveillance footage of the attack - with 911 calls from frantic parents and students as the only soundtrack. And a sequence featuring two Columbine survivors "returning" the bullets embedded in their bodies to K-Mart headquarters in Troy, MI. But Moore quickly moves outside the narrow scope of Littleton, CO to consider gun violence in America generally.
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| Note to self: Do not cross this dog. |
Moore's exploration of that subject is intriguing, frequently hilarious, but at the same time maddeningly diffuse. There's a lot here that feels true about the violence in our culture: (a) our increasingly violence-on-demand foreign policy (represented by bombings and installing dictators by Moore, but one can't help but think drone attacks today); (b) our long fraught history of white supremacy and racial tension; (c) a commercial culture based on fear (articulated succinctly and persuasively by Marilyn Manson, of all people); (d) anti-government militia movements; (e) a high school culture that lets lost souls get lost; (f) welfare to work programs that are taking parents from their kids; and (g) an out of control and insanely well-funded NRA. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In the moment, whatever Moore is exploring at the time seems a convincing explanation, but then we're whiplashed into some other explanation that doesn't really cohere or seem relevant to the specific example of Columbine.
The best example of this is probably Moore's comparison of the US and Canada. Both countries are similar culturally and have a huge ratio of guns to population. But there's almost no gun violence in Canada. In an amusing sequence, Moore illustrates how much safer Canadians feel by walking into the unlocked homes of unsuspecting Torontoans.* When someone suggests that greater racial homogeneity in Canada might explain the difference, Moore immediately swats that down with hardly a comment. BUT he's just spent a big chunk of Bowling for Columbine's running time (including a South Park-esque cartoon history lesson) talking about how racial tension in the US might lie at the root of our gun culture! That quick refutation of his own argument just confuses me to this day - especially when his film closes on a befuddled NRA President Charlton Heston essentially admitting (and instantly wishing he didn't) that we white people need our guns to keep the less desirables at bay.# I don't think that's a terribly persuasive explanation for why we kill each other like crazy, but its an interesting enough argument that you either need to really make it or tear it apart. (Side note: Does anyone know if the NRA being founded the same year the KKK was outlawed is anything other than mere coincidence? It's an interesting tidbit Moore drops without (maddeningly!) really following up on).
That lack of focus and the episodic nature of the film ultimately leaves the viewer a little lost on the point of it all. It doesn't sap the effectiveness of some of the individual moments, especially a disturbing and transfixing interview with James Nicholls - brother of Oklahoma City co-conspirator Terry Nicholls (I'd like to see that interview extended into a feature of its own). But, at the end, I was left a little cold. (And, while I'm sympathetic generally to Moore's point of view, the self-mythologizing man of the people in oversized fishing cap schtick feels a little hackneyed after all these years.)
All the same, Amelia has used individual clips from this teaching, so we plan on keeping it for educational purposes only.
FINAL (MIXED) VERDICT: PITCH for Home but KEEP for School.
NEXT UP: THE BREAK UP.
*Also hilarious: The Canadian woman who boasts about not locking her doors, despite having her home broken into twice. Dear Canadian Lady, Take the hint and buy a deadbolt. Sincerely, Cynical American.
#Heston ironically says this in front of a Touch of Evil poster, wherein he is famously (mis)cast as a Mexican cop.
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