**** - Opening this Friday
"Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore's new documentary, is the winner of the 55th Annual Cannes Film Festival, but it remains to be seen if it attracts a large audience when it opens in wide release in this weekend. The film is a scathing, striking critique and analysis of violence in America, which might not be popular amongst the same Americans who storm to the box office for whatever "shoot 'em up" flick starring Vin Diesel premieres.
The documentary begins with a montage of news footage from around the world, showing devastation and death caused by U.S. military intervention in Kosovo, Nicaragua, Sudan, Panama and many other countries.
But Moore, the acclaimed director of "Roger and Me," is anything but a conventional journalist. To emphasize his charged political viewpoints, he cuts in sound bytes, film clips and news footage, which reveals that the U.S. trained and donated $3 billion to Osama bin Laden, BCC coverage of the U.S. bombing a so-called "weapons plant" during Desert Storm which turned out to be an aspirin factory, as well as footage of the wreckage and carnage of hospitals and schools bombed in Kosovo by U.S. planes.
However, anyone familiar with Moore's work knows he's not a drop-dead serious activist. He's a comedian and a biting one at that. Amidst the serious images, Moore breaks up the profundity with absurd situations.
Take, for example, the humorlessly oblivious Michigan state trooper who describes an accident where hunters strap a rifle on their dog and while dragging the weapon around, the dog shoots its owner. Moore asks the trooper if he thinks that perhaps the dog knew what it was doing when it shot its owner, and the trooper replies matter-of-factly that under state law, an animal can't be charged with a crime against a human.
Moore knows that by giving his subjects enough freedom, they shoot themselves in the foot. One of Moore's interviews is with James Nichols, who was charged along with his brother Terry and Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, but was acquitted of the crime. At the beginning of the interview, Nichols seems to be a regular guy who owns and operates an organic farm, but it soon comes out that he's an all-out firearms fanatic like his brother and McVeigh; he keeps a loaded gun under his pillow in case an intruder happens to travel out to the middle of nowhere to rob him.
While these examples are amusing, they also effectively trace the benign origins of American violence. The strange humor Moore finds in our gun culture quickly turns to seriousness when he connects the Unites States' unmatched violent crime rates to a subservient commercial news media. Moore believes the media is in the business of spreading fear and that it's the conduit by which our government runs the country.
Such connections are brilliantly illustrated as he intercuts one of many "let's go get 'em" speeches by current President George W. Bush with a similar speech by charismatic National Rifle Association President Charleton Heston. The Alzheimer's-suffering American icon needs no help from Moore in filling in the role of Satan in "Bowling for Columbine;" the scary thing is that as you're watching, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is not fiction, this guy is for real!
To illustrate this point, Moore shows Heston giving a NRA pro-gun rally speech in Littleton a week after the Columbine High School shooting. In the rally, Heston manages to slant the Columbine tragedy as a threat to gun ownership and a large crowd cheers as he raises his rifle high above his head.
Just like Bush, Heston enacts the ideal of the white American hero on the frontier, an embodiment of American individualism. This whole mythology relates directly to the war-mongering news disseminated by our commercial media. Moore poses this as the difference between the U.S. and our peaceful Canadian neighbors, who proportionately have just as many firearms, but virtually a hundredth of our violent crimes.
"Bowling for Columbine" paints a portrait of America that is a breeding ground for paranoid heroes, holding on to their weapons for fear of a manufactured enemy. Viewers who don't know what they're in for can expect to be sucker-punched by Moore's insightful new film.
