|
Converting a split
[Photo: United Artists]
Michael Moore buys bullets from employee Amanda Duncan at a Canadian store in his latest documentary, Bowling for Columbine. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 31, 2002
|
View a clip
|
|
Michael Moore's latest effort, Bowling for Columbine, leaves the audience pondering good and evil: freedom vs. harm done with guns.
|
 |
Michael Moore doesn't play fair, and he can be unfairly playful about grave subjects: his hometown's death by corporate strangulation in Roger & Me, the self-serving common-man advocacy of The Big One and a variety of skewered current events on his late, lamented TV Nation and The Awful Truth cable series.
Moore makes political statements like anyone else does, weighing them with dubious facts and twisting context to his advantage. He just happens to have a camera and, more important, an editing room to stack the polemics in his favor. A platoon of fact-checkers would be required to confirm his statistics and claims. Moore's films are so slanted that you almost have to tilt your head to watch them.
Viewers need to remember all this before getting too enraged about his latest rant, Bowling for Columbine, which deals with America's national pastime, gun violence. Moore is a bleeding-heart liberal and a card-carrying National Rifle Association member, although that affiliation seems more like an infiltration tool. It gets him into NRA president Charlton Heston's home, where Moore indulges his preference for "ambush journalism," a delicious term considering the topic.
Filmmaker Michael Moore checks a rifle in his documentary on gun violence.
|
Bowling for Columbine is intended to convince, yet it's so outrageously funny that even gun control supporters have to shake their heads at Moore's process. What the film does brilliantly is engage the audience in a shared, inner debate about the good of freedom vs. the evil done with guns. The debate is sure to continue, perhaps vehemently, after the show ends. This movie rouses rabble on both sides of the fence. Moore is a masterful instigator, certainly too convinced that he's right but always fascinating to watch.
Starting with a visit to a bank where new depositors get free rifles and ending with Moore laying a photograph of a 6-year-old girl slain at school on Heston's doorstep, Bowling for Columbine is a compelling portrait of a nation at war with itself. Moore doesn't pull any punches, even if some are of the sucker variety. The title refers to the P.E. class attended by the student killers at Columbine High School before they opened fire. Moore shows split-screen security camera footage of the assault, just because he can and he knows the reaction he'll get.
Moore isn't interested only in shocks. He poses a tough question: Why are U.S. gun killing rates dramatically higher than any other major nation's? Heston credits it to "dead, smart white guys" who founded America before "mixed ethnicity" stirred the melting pot, a regrettable choice of words. You can sense Moore's pleasure at capturing them for posterity. Another segment spoofs Heston's take with an animated U.S. history lesson crafted by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
The movie ricochets from one careless absurdity to the next: a student named the No. 2 threat to his school in post-Columbine paranoia ("I wanted to be No. 1," he complains); an interview with wild-eyed John Nichols, brother of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, still training in a well-regulated militia. It's a measure of Moore's cockeyed pessimism that rock star Marilyn Manson, one of many entertainment scapegoats for Columbine, contributes the most intelligent response to Moore's questioning.
Moore is not above grandstanding, as when he takes two survivors of the Columbine massacre to Kmart headquarters for a refund on the bullets lodged in their bodies. He confronts Dick Clark about Michigan's welfare-to-work program that employed the mother -- 40 miles from home, at Clark's restaurant -- of the boy who killed that aforementioned little girl. But is Clark anyone to answer for that death? Or should it be the uncle who carelessly left a pistol for the boy to carry? He is never approached.
The filmmaker saves some of his sharpest barbs for the news media, a bloodthirsty bunch, in his eyes, that prefers violent reports over substantive news. But they're the same bunch he drags behind him to Kmart, never giving them at least partial credit for forcing the victory he wins. Everyone can find something to feel hot under the collar about in Bowling for Columbine, and that's the point.
By asking questions with no distinct answers, Moore is able to hilariously create his own. He may not honestly believe there's any connection between Columbine and the U.S. bombing of Kosovo the same day but he'll defend to the death his right to suggest it. It's up to the rest of us to become informed enough to know if he's kidding. Moore knows the power of the camera, and he'll give it up when they pry it from his cold, dead hand.
Bowling for Columbine
- Grade: A
- Director: Michael Moore
- Cast: Michael Moore, Charlton Heston, John Nichols, Marilyn Manson, Matt Stone, Dick Clark
- Screenplay: Michael Moore
- Rating: R; violence, profanity, mature themes
- Running time: 120 min.
Back to Weekend
© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111
|
