Anyone remotely familiar with American film-maker Michael Moore’s filmography would not be surprised by the undisguised, unambiguous slant of his latest venture. Fahrenheit 11/9, his cinematic polemic directed at the Donald Trump era in American politics. Indeed, Moore nails his colours to the mast in the film’s title: the deliberate juxtaposition of the numbers 9 and 11 is a nod to Moore’s renowned 2004 film, Fahrenheit 9/11, his inquisition of the then Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. 11/9 is intended to refer to the date November 9 2016, the day after Trump’s surprise election victory; the inference is far from subtle, in Moore’s customary style, and unmistakable: Trump’s unexpected elevation to the White House is a disaster equivalent to the events of September 11, 2001.
However, the film’s devotes little running time to a familiar excoriation of Trump’s various outrages and misdemeanours; Trump himself is almost an incidental character in Moore’s version of events. For him, the true villains of the piece are his enablers, those who by their complacency or malfeasance made the unlikely Trump presidency possible. The culprits are numerous: Hilary Clinton and her inept, tone-deaf campaign, Clinton’s sponsors in the Democratic Party who allegedly rigged the primary process to bestow the nomination on her rather than Bernie Sanders (clearly Moore’s preferred candidate), and the generation of Democrat politicians, up to and certainly including Barack Obama, who had, through their compromise and lack of conviction, betrayed and disenfranchised their progressive, working-class constituency. And, preeminently, much of the blame for the Trump ascendancy is laid at the feet of the mainstream media who, dazzled by Trump’s ‘celebrity’ status and the colour and shade he brought to an otherwise insipid election year, gave him an enormous amount of non-critical coverage in the early stages of what was widely assumed to be an unserious ‘vanity’ candidacy. And Moore, to his credit, does not exempt himself from the (dis)honour roll of Trump’s inadvertent media enablers.
Unfortunately, the central message of Moore’s film is somewhat undercut by his trademark scatter-gun approach. The laundry list of grievance is long and runs the gamut from Democratic political corruption, the water lead poisoning scandal in Michigan, family separation in immigrant families, gun violence in schools, exploitation of low-paid workers in Virginia, and much more besides. At the end of the day, Moore’s attempt to cover so much ground only dissipates and dilutes the passion and urgency of his message. In particular, Moore can’t seem to help himself from indulging in his familiar stunts; spraying the garden belonging to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder with tainted water, and attempting to place the self-same Snyder under citizen’s arrest in person. The comedic impact of these episodes is minimal at best; they feel forced and contrived and could have been left on the cutting room floor without detracting in any way from the finished product. On the contrary, these sequences seem more than a little obligatory and under-graduate, and give the impression of Moore straining to satisfy the expectations of his loyal audience. The overall effect, it seems to me, is to undercut and trivialise the gravity of the very serious allegations that Moore is making: in Snyder’s case, no less than willful manslaughter.
The same could be said about one of the film’s final sequences, where historical footage of Nazi rallies and Hitler’s oratory is spliced and overlaid on audio from Trump’s speeches. This, too, seems obvious, heavy-handed and arbitrary. and rather sells the audience short. History (and one might dare hope, the US electorate) may well deliver a very negative judgment on the Trump presidency, but the US has had plenty of venal, corrupt and incompetent presidents in its history. You don’t need to draw a false, somewhat overblown equivalency with Hitler to prosecute this case against Trump, and to do so verges on an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.
Moore’s lapse into over-inflated hyperbole is a shame, because Fahrenheit 11/9, at its best, makes many telling and salient points about the existential crisis of American democracy in the age of Trump. Perhaps most salient is Moore’s insistence, counter to at least one prevalent view, that Trump is no mere aberration who fell out of a clear blue sky, but instead the most recent culmination of an anti-democratic trend whose origins predate Trump, and seems likely to outlast him.
It is worth reflecting on the fact that Moore’s earlier film, evoked in the title of this one, Fahrenheit 9/11, was clearly intended to contribute to the defeat of George W Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Instead, history tells us that, in 2004, the Republicans secured a majority of the popular vote for the only time in the last seven presidential elections. It would be unfair to blame Moore for this outcome, but his film obviously did little in the end to prevent it. He does his best to find a hopeful note in the apparent, reinvigorated progressive activism of a younger generation, and, like him, one can but hope. But the lasting impression left by Moore’s film is still most likely to be a distinct chill running down the spine.