My, how times have changed. When now household name Michael Moore won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2003 for Bowling for Columbine (2003), a couple of years after the Sept 11 attacks and United States’ subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he began his acceptance speech innocently enough. But then he got political with scathing criticism of George W. Bush who had been elected President despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore: “We like non-fiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or fiction of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr Bush. Shame on you, Mr Bush, shame on you.”

I watched with my mouth open at the time as the gutsy documentary filmmaker was booed off stage. Retrospectively speaking, perhaps the most striking thing about this Oscar moment is that the people booing were the Hollywood elite, who are now so sickened by the state of affairs in their country that the same speech today would have resulted in a standing ovation. Moore, of course, was ahead of his time with his self-awareness.

After the speech, he had to hire security because of being regularly harassed and threatened by conservatives and liberals alike who were caught in the intoxication of nationalism. Certainly, America has grown up by leaps and bounds since. Many, including dozens of close personal American friends, have since come to realise that being fairly critical of your nation’s leadership and military is perhaps more patriotic — a concept that certain South Asian countries are still struggling with, ahem.

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 is often an affecting piece of work that examines how America came to a position where it elected Donald Trump to the highest office in the country

Moore’s next documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) was a blockbuster, to date still the highest-grossing documentary of all time. This critique of the War on Terror and America’s jingoistic media at the time (who can forget CNN’s grotesque cheerleading as bombs fell on Iraq) was pivotal in reprogramming the minds of an entire generation. It was Moore at his best, with powerfully edited and perfectly paced sequences that were both revealing and entertaining. So timely was the documentary that it started an awakening.

In many ways, Fahrenheit 11/9 is Moore at his best. Wonderfully edited, it is a powerful piece of work that examines how America came to a position where it elected Donald Trump to the highest office in the country. With typical Michael Moore awareness, it is a well-rounded take. It argues that Barack Obama wasn’t a saint either, and paved the road for hateful politics — with eye-opening footage from Moore’s hometown of Flint, where the American president let down his own supporters by playing cowardly politics around the issue of a water supply that was poisoning and killing people.

Shocking video clips show how Obama condemned the people further by turning their already embattled city into a practice war zone, causing voters to lose faith in the Democrats. It takes aim at the Democratic Party, which conspired against presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders and was indirectly responsible for the final result of the election. The film also draws frightening parallels between Donald Trump and Hitler, and the state of the Republican Party and the Nazis by presenting us with eerily similar political chess moves.

Where Fahrenheit 11/9 falls short is in its pacing. Moore uses the Flint water crisis as an example of the deeper malaise that infects America as a whole. Certainly, the investigatory work by the filmmaker is eye-opening, and Moore knows it, spending a significant percentage of the runtime on his hometown. Unfortunately, the transitions between these scenes and the rest of the film don’t segue too smoothly; leaving Fahrenheit 11/9 often feeling like it is two documentaries stitched into one.

A fair criticism of Moore has been his tendency to embellish facts and bend the truth in his earlier work when fate didn’t allow him to capture sensational footage. Since then he’s been careful to adhere closer to the ethics of journalism. While Fahrenheit 11/9 is a very good film, it doesn’t feature as many jaw-dropping moments as his best work though, as I said, that’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes with documentary filmmaking.

Of course, some of this is a sign of the times. A decade ago, it was easier for Moore to stun us with exclusive video that he had quietly acquired. But in the age of social media, where just about anything can go viral in minutes, it is a tougher task. Undoubtedly, you’ve already seen many of the clips Fahrenheit 11/9 uses to make its arguments. What makes Moore such a master of his craft though, is his skill in framing the footage in a manner that is still deeply affecting.

Rated R for language and some disturbing material/images

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 30th, 2018