“How. The f**k. Did we get here. And how. The f**k. Do we get out?” Michael Moore’s movie gets chuckles, snickers and chills after hearing the award-winning Documentarian pose those 2 questions in a soft, slow, deliberate voice from the start. He’s talking about Donald Trump’s Presidency. There’s plenty of this but without as much footage of Donald Trump as we expected. Moore covers many other issues here, too!
The film’s title, Fahrenheit 11/9, refers back to Moore’s 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary exploring the causes of the Iraq War and the World Trade Center attack. The swap in the date takes us to the day in 2016 that Trump was elected. Moore’s believes these two days are historically tragic.
He places blame for Trump’s political ascendancy at the feet of singer Gwen Stefani of all people! Moore posits that when Trump learned NBC was paying her more to be a judge on “The Voice” than he received for “The Apprentice,” he staged his Trump Tower escalator ride to announce his candidacy. He wanted to show the network what a REAL celebrity looked like, complete with paid shills to cheer him on. Actually running and winning was never part of the plan.
Moore targets The Electoral College as one puzzle piece that continues to deny Americans true democracy. He shows that this vestige of Slave Era compromise has turned the White House over to the popular vote loser time and time again.
Moore chooses to take a scatter-shot approach bouncing to a variety of issues. First up? The Flint lead-in-the-water crisis. Flint, Moore’s hometown, was the locale for his first big splash, Roger and Me, about the G.M. chairman, Roger Smith, and the the greed that put thousands of Flint workers on the street. Here, the target is Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and his denial of the crisis that poisoned thousands of Flint residents. They were forced to drink horrifically polluted water while he re-routed clean water to the G.M. plant to keep it from rotting auto parts so that it could remain solvent.
There is disturbing footage of President Barack O’Bama visiting Flint. He tries to show that the water is now good by calling for a glass and drinking it. Moore’s shows graphically, not once, but twice, that President Obama’s lips were the only things that touched the water. He did not take one sip.
Moore likes to use Guerrilla tactics as centerpieces of his narrative, and this film has a doozy. It’s brilliant. He fills up a water tanker, driving it to Governor Snyder’s residence and watering his trees with Flint’s finest tainted H2O. We were hoping for a before and after shot to see what it did to the trees, or an angry reaction from the Governor, but it was not there. Missed opportunity for the film, but still highly amusing.
