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There’s more than one villain in Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore’s new anti-Trump movie
There’s more than one villain in Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore’s new anti-Trump movie
By PETER HOWELLMovie Critic
Fri., Sept. 7, 2018
There were “Angry Baby Trump” balloons flying outside the Ryerson Theatre Thursday night.
Inside the packed auditorium, moviegoers sported red bandanas that had
been handed to them on the way in, a symbol of support for working people.
The scene was set and the pump was primed for the world premiere of
Fahrenheit 11/9 at opening day of TIFF 2018. It’s a new film by Michigan firebrand Michael Moore that tries to answer the “WTF?” question about how America ended up with Donald Trump as U.S. president.
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And in coming up with answers both comical and serious, Moore may surprise viewers by arguing there’s more than one villain in this story — and at
least a couple of the baddies are people you’d likely never suspect. Trump
is indeed a very bad president, he says, but “Donald Trump didn’t just
fall from the sky.”
Complacency on the part of regular people and political parties, along
with complicity by ratings-hungry media, not just in the U.S. but
everywhere, contributed to a slide in societal values and a thirst for sensation that led to the elevating of a reality TV star to the most
powerful job in the world. To quote a famous line from Pogo, that most
American of comic strips: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The title Fahrenheit 11/9 is a hat tip to Moore’s Oscar-winning 2002 doc
about America’s stumbling efforts in the so-called “War on Terror,” but
it’s also a direct numerical reference to Nov. 9, 2016. In the wee hours
of that day, the presidential election was called in Trump’s favour. He
had overcome long odds to defeat his rival Hillary Clinton, not by the
popular vote — he trailed her by three million ballots — but by the
electoral college system of winner-take-all state ballots, a legacy of the slave era originally designed to protect racist southern interests.
Moore displays damning statistics: 63 million ballots in the popular vote
for Clinton, 60 million for Trump and another 100 million potential votes
which were never cast, for a variety of reasons, and which could have
changed history had they been cast. Then, the director posits the amusing theory — one that actually isn’t completely far-fetched, knowing Trump’s penchant for one-upmanship — that pop star Gwen Stefani is to blame for
the carrot-topped egotist’s bid for the presidency.
Trump found out that Stefani was getting paid more for episodes of The
Voice than he was for The Apprentice, and he tried to call NBC’s bluff
with a presidential bid that would prove his popularity and force NBC to
pay him more money. A couple of ecstatic public rallies later, Trump
decided he was seriously in the game, although Moore argues that, deep
down, the man never really wanted to be president.
There’s an abrupt segue about 40 minutes into this two-hour doc, switching
from Trump’s antics to the trauma of Flint, Mich., Moore’s hometown. The auto-building city has suffered mightily from abandonment by General
Motors and by degradation of the water supply, the latter due to a
monumentally foolish decision by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican crony and
pal of Trump’s.
Snyder disconnected Flint’s water supply from the safety of Lake Huron to
the toxicity of the Flint River, a cost-cutting move his officials tried
to downplay and also cover up, even as the water was poisoning thousands
of adults and children.
Moore introduces us to a whistle-blower in the bureaucracy who refused to falsify test results that showed sky-high levels of lead in many Flint residents.
But perhaps the most shocking villain Moore calls out, if you want to call
him that, is former U.S. President Barack Obama, who is seen visiting
Flint and blithely accepting Snyder’s claim that Flint’s water is now safe
to drink (it’s not, even today). Obama is twice seen pretending to drink
from glasses of Flint water, but he actually barely sips from them, and he blithely accepts Snyder’s assurances, much to the fury of Flint residents interviewed afterwards.
Enraged by what happened to his hometown, Moore fills up a tanker truck
with Flint water and drives to Snyder’s mansion, where he proceeds to
spray that contents onto the governor’s lawn and driveway in an amusingly cathartic gesture.
Trump baby balloons float on the red carpet for the world premiere of
Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 11/9.
This then leads to the scattershot third section of the film, the weakest
of the three, in which Moore yields to bad humour — comparison between
Trump and Hitler is as obvious as it is overdone — and also examines all
manner of societal ills, school shootings among them.
He visits with surviving students of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. earlier this year, who have now become vocal advocates for gun control.
Moore brought three of the students onto the Ryerson Theatre stage at the
end of Thursday’s screening, along with the Flint water whistle-blower and
her husband, to enthusiastic applause.
Moore admits he has a Utopian mind beneath his baseball cap and above his
blue collar: “The America I want to save is the America we’ve never had.”
But he’d also like to have some muscle on his side, and he proposes a new
job for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is no meek pugilist in
the boxing ring.
“Thank you for your prime minster,” Moore said. “I’d like to see him go
three rounds in the ring with our guy.”
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/tiff/2018/09/07/theres-more-than- one-villain-in-fahrenheit-119-michael-moores-new-anti-trump-movie.html
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