Substance over style

CANNES, France —  “What if,” wonders Michael Moore, just asking, “George Bush filed a Writers Guild grievance against my film? Because the funniest lines in it are his, not mine.”

Never mind Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks, Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie, this almost willfully unglamorous man in jeans, sandals, pullover shirt and “Made in Canada” baseball cap is the center of the Festival de Cannes’ biggest media storm. Variety cheekily calls him “Fest’s Fave Pest,” while a French film magazine more grandly insists he’s one man “Contre L’Empire,” against the American empire.

“It’s a product of the times we live in, not me,” Moore says, thinking about it. “With what’s going on in the world, in the States, this becomes a focal point because I’m willing to put my toe in the water and make a movie about something.”

That movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which had an unprecedented five same-day screenings on Monday, four of them for the press, became a cause celebre even before it got here when Disney Co. refused to allow Harvey Weinstein and his Miramax division to distribute it because of the film’s partisan political nature. That led, among other things, to a political cartoon with a “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs” marquee and a man saying, “Sneezy’s a Bush Critic, So Disney Dumped Him.”

Always one to relish moments like that, a buoyant Weinstein showed up at the end of “Fahrenheit’s” first press screening, insisting he was there “for reactions” and not to answer questions about the film’s still undecided distribution future. “Have I ever let you down?” he answered when a plaintive European television journalist asked if America would get to see the film. Clearly enjoying the brouhaha, Weinstein sighed an ironic sigh and said, to no one in particular, “All those reports about me losing my edge are so true.”

Though it’s been characterized in press reports as an examination of the Bush family’s relationship to Saudi Arabia, the impressive “Fahrenheit 9/11” turns out to be both more ambitious and more complex.

What Moore has in effect given us is an alternate history of the last four years on the U.S. political scene “as if [counterculture historian] Howard Zinn had a movie camera,” he says, that covers the disputed 2000 election, the Patriot Act and the preamble to and aftermath of the Iraqi invasion, as well as that Bush-Saudi connection.

The film is also, not unexpectedly, an unapologetic and incendiary indictment of the current administration’s policies and their implications.

But that fury is leavened by surprisingly emotional sequences, excellent use of previously unseen footage and Moore’s trademark impish sense of humor, his sharp eye for both what he can make fun of and what makes fun of itself.

That category includes U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft singing “Let the Eagle Soar,” a song of his own composing, unedited clips of the president that the networks have never shown us, as well as candidate Bush meeting Moore on the campaign trail and saying, “Behave yourself, will you? Go find real work.” But the film also includes video footage of soldiers in the field abusing Iraqi prisoners -- some laugh as they grab a prisoner’s genitals through a blanket -- as well as interviews with discontented GIs captured by Moore cameramen embedded with U.S. troops under non-Michael Moore pretenses.

What is perhaps most surprising in “Fahrenheit 9/11” is Moore’s decision to make himself less visible as an on-camera presence, in part because the filmmaker says he “has not been able to come to grips with my own recovery from Sept. 11.”

“I’m someone who lives in New York, who was supposed to fly that day, who lost a friend on the Boston flight, who watched the World Trade Center being built from my aunt’s porch on Staten Island,” he says. “I just couldn’t come to grips with my own sadness, I just wasn’t there yet. I felt that the issues that sprung from Sept. 11 deserved to be much more front and center.”

Besides, Moore says, “I don’t personally like to be on camera, I don’t like looking at myself on screen. There’s always been a sign in my editing rooms that says ‘When in doubt, cut me out.’ I’ve found that a little bit of me goes a long way.”

For all the confidence of his films and his politics, Moore can sound uncertain and ambivalent about his personal appearances. This is how he describes what went through his head the night he won his Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine” and made a famously political speech from the podium.

“Do you think I wanted to give that speech at the Oscars?” he says, warming to the subject. “That was my night; I’d accomplished something. Was I going to give up my moment for the greater good, hokey as that sounds?

“Climbing the stairs, I was like Gollum in ‘Lord of the Rings’ with two voices in my head. Just blow them a kiss. No, you have work to do. You don’t have to say anything, just thank your agent. Shut up, there’s a war going on; you have to say something.”

Hearing Moore’s passionate rendition of the two Gollum voices, one stern, the other flighty, is a reminder of how funny he is in person, and the filmmaker doesn’t want that forgotten as far as his film is concerned. “I believe in healthy doses of humor, if we sink into despair about what we’re going through we won’t survive,” he says. “You want to do something that’s fresh, something that’s original, not the same old, same old. I always start with the attitude, ‘What would be cool to see?’ If I put the message first, I believe no one will go. I say that so much it sounds like my mantra, but it’s what I believe in my bones.”

Moore acknowledges, however, “it was more of a challenge to bring humor to the film without me being the poker. But I felt I could do that in other ways, with footage, voice-over and cutting. No one’s going to mistake this for anything other than my film.”

Still, Moore is not always buoyant himself, especially when it comes to the prospects of his film with different distribution this late in the game.

“Everyone’s saying, ‘This is great publicity for the film: You’re really going to sell some tickets,’ but if you’ve seen the box office receipts for ‘Kids’ and ‘Dogma’ that’s not backed up by the facts. Name me one film that’s gone on to huge box office success after their distributor said no eight weeks before the opening. Still, it’s ‘Oh, Michael Moore and Harvey are doing some publicity stunt.’ Man, dig a little deeper than that.”

One of the ironies of Michael Moore’s position, not lost on the man himself, is that though he’s one of the nation’s preeminent left-wing voices, his personality has earned him as much criticism, if not more, from liberals than conservatives.

“My way of looking at the world comes from a Midwestern populism and a working-class sensibility, and that’s always felt uncomfortable to otherwise good liberals who think, ‘I wish we had someone more cultured. Why him?’ ” Moore says about the issue. “What is their problem? Why do they always want to be on the losing end of things? I’m trying to bring the vast majority of Americans along with me.

“People like me have to save liberals from themselves. This is not a job I went looking for; it wasn’t in the career guidance I received in high school. I may come off as abrasive, but what am I supposed to do, wait around for the next Tom Daschle to lead us?”

Moore pauses and his eye falls on a magazine with his picture on the cover. “Really, how sad is it that it’s left up to this guy with a high school education,” he says. “Let this guy go back to Flint and everyone else start doing their job.”