Michael Moore Hates America (2004)

★★★
In 2004, I didn’t believe that Michael Moore hated America. Now I’m not so sure. He is a filmmaker who uses the documentary format to tell stories and advance his viewpoint. He’s shameless about it. It worked in Roger & Me and The Big One. By the time Fahrenheit 9/11 came out, he had morphed into a pompous imbecile who presented events in his films that were completely detached from reality. It’s interesting to chart the evolution of his career, to watch him maintaining his everyman act but appearing in increasingly absurd situations that have become more obvious as the years progressed. When he couldn’t fall any lower, he did with Sicko, in which he abandoned all pretensions of a man searching for the truth. He is actually a man who will manipulate events to his liking and employ whatever means necessary, no matter how unscrupulous, to achieve his objectives. Maybe this is the man who was there all along. Perhaps The Big One, his most authentic film, was to get us to drop our guard and make way for the liar within him.

Is that too strong a word? In today’s hypersensitive climate, it could be deemed extremist, yet consider what Michael Wilson reveals in Michael Moore Hates America. In the opening scenes of Bowling for Columbine, Moore demonstrates how he went into a bank to take advantage of a promotion to obtain a gun in exchange for opening an account. The scene concludes with Moore walking out the door with a gun held high, allegedly proving his point that guns are handed out so recklessly that even a bank would give it away. Every shot inside the bank is masterfully edited, relaying a smooth and seamless chain of events in which Moore interacts with bank employees, who seemingly verify that Moore can indeed get a gun on the spot. Michael Wilson visited that bank to get the inside story. It turns out that Moore made specific requests that were outside the norm in order to make it appear that getting a gun from this bank was that easy. In actuality, clients who open an account must receive their new gun from a licensed dealer much later. Guns are stored and shipped from a vault hundreds of miles away.

Now, maybe Moore wanted to illustrate the larger issue of the ease of obtaining a gun in the U.S. For that, Moore could have filmed himself in a pawn shop simply buying a gun. Instead, he staged this elaborate scene and made the bank employees the unwitting accomplices to this farce because, dramatically, it makes for riveting viewing. As for Wilson, he makes a pretty open-and-shut case on what really happened, but he doesn’t stop there. Michael Moore Hates America is Wilson’s attempt to obtain an interview with Moore, much like how Moore tried to obtain an interview with Roger Smith in Roger & Me. In one telling scene, Wilson attends a rally where Moore is speaking and asks him for an interview while revealing the title for his movie. Moore is appalled. Throughout the rest of the movie, Wilson’s attempts to reach Moore are unsuccessful.

Michael Wilson discusses his own upbringing in the American Midwest. He probably never imagined himself making a movie, and judging by his career after Michael Moore Hates America, he has largely stayed away from making any more and went back to his private life. This one time, though, he came at the right moment and captured lightning in a bottle. He assembled a team and wanted to make a movie that served as a counterpoint to Moore’s vision of the current state of the country. He didn’t believe that the U.S. was as hostile as Moore thought. To illustrate this point, he shows himself talking to Moore fans outside that rally, who politely agree that Wilson had every right to request an interview and that Moore should have accepted. He also counters Moore’s assertion that Canada is safer and therefore Canadians leave their doors unlocked. Wilson travels north to see for himself and encounters a number of locked doors. Another Moore myth busted.

Wilson goes beyond exposing Moore’s dishonesty. He meets with other media personalities to discuss Moore’s methods. Front and center is the late Andrew Breitbart, who perfectly dissects Moore’s antics and calls out the Academy Awards for awarding Best Documentary to Bowling for Columbine because of its questionable content. Magician Penn Jillette, himself no stranger to shady interviews (his T.V. show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! featured voiceover questions for interview subjects who obviously did not talk to Jillette), correctly points out Moore’s tactics and the consequences of doing so. Wilson hit the jackpot by scoring an interview with Albert Maysles, director of the classic documentary Grey Gardens. He knows a thing or two about capturing the truth about his subjects on camera, so his analysis of Moore’s methods is extremely enlightening.

If Moore believes in his message, then he should express it, but it’s hard to take him seriously when counterarguments like Michael Moore Hates America and the lesser Fahrenhype 9/11 can so easily debunk him, often by simply interviewing the same people who clarify their roles. He’s defeating himself, though as this movie demonstrates, there is still an audience for his nonsense that will eat it up even when exposed to the truth. Wilson talks to a few of them, but in what may seem shocking as I write these words in 2022, the attendees at Moore’s rally converse respectfully with Wilson. Everyone agrees to disagree, and everyone walks away unscathed. If Wilson made this movie today, he’d be labeled with several unpleasantries. The most popular insults are “racist,” “misogynist” and “fascist.” Let’s be clear about something. The world is a rough place, and there are people who thrive on oppression. There are awful people and events everywhere. A truthful documentary can be made about such things. If the subject at hand is so bad, then it shouldn’t be necessary to invent anything. Is Moore’s position really so weak that he needs to employ negative tactics? George W. Bush was not a good president. His horrible joke about searching for weapons of mass destruction under his lectern was tasteless in light of the fact that a lot of military personnel were killed looking for them. That wasn’t good enough for Moore, who lamented that Bush was frequently on vacation, even though the President of the United States is never truly on vacation.

This movie would be good enough if it were just an exposé of Michael Moore, but something interesting happens. Wilson finds himself falling victim to some of Moore’s methods. For example, he misrepresents himself when interviewing an official from Davison, Michigan, where Moore was born and went to high school. It’s an interesting dilemma—having an initial point of view (the U.S. isn’t as bad as Moore says it is) inevitably influences the questions asked and the way a scene is staged. Jillette touches upon this too. The aforementioned Grey Gardens and Errol Morris’s debut Gates of Heaven are documentaries in their purest form. They are also difficult to do. Even in the format’s earliest days, some scene staging was evident (see 1922’s Nanook of the North). Wilson comes to understand the temptation of steering a documentary into a specific direction. The difference between Wilson and Moore is that Wilson expresses misgivings over this realization, while Moore embraces it. Maybe that’s why Wilson never made anything like this again. He was a concerned citizen who made a movie about an important topic but exited as quickly as he entered, perhaps to save himself. Wherever he is, I hope he’s doing well. We know what Moore’s been doing, and it isn’t good.

© 2022 Silver Screen Reviews