The Art of Burning Bush

By RICHARD CORLISS/CANNES

The beautiful people were back. After a lackluster 2003 session of mediocre films and low celebrity wattage, this year's Cannes Film Festival atoned in substance and style. It boasted a stronger slate of movies (potent new works from Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou and Jean-Luc Godard) and burst with star power under the brilliant Riviera sun. Waving from the red-carpeted steps of the Grand Palais were your Hankses and Diazes, your Brad Pitts and Mike Myerses--enough representatives of the rich and famous to fill a Cabala convention.

For all those eight-figure earners, the largest presence at this French film fete was a fellow from Flint, Mich., who's usually seen in a scruffy beard and duck-hunter couture. Michael Moore was prowling the Riviera, and this time the game he aimed at was George W. Bush. Bull's-eye! His Fahrenheit 9/11 captured Cannes's highest prize, the Palme d'Or, from a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. "What have you done?" the winner asked in benign shock. "You just did this to mess with me."

Moore should be used to prizes by now. His 2002 Bowling for Columbine earned $58 million worldwide and an Oscar nod that Moore turned into a decisive media event when, in his acceptance speech, he scolded the President for invading Iraq. So Cannes was primed for his latest movie Molotov cocktail. Its first screening, on a Monday at 8 a.m., got total team news coverage; a dozen or so radio and TV crews circled the U.S. critics to get their early reaction as Miramax Films co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose Disney bosses had forbidden him to release the film, paced nearby and chortled, "They say I've lost my edge? Have I lost my edge?" He had not. He spent the rest of the week negotiating with a flock of U.S. distributors hoping to profit from the film's marketable notoriety.

Left-wing documentaries are nothing new. In fact, with the exception of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-rally film Triumph of the Will, it's hard to think of a right-wing documentary. Nor was Moore alone in his obsession with the Republican elite. Among the festival screenings were the documentary Bush's Brain (about adviser Karl Rove) and a fact-based drama, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. But Fahrenheit 9/11 had all the hot press. And it more than lived up to its advance rep.

The film details, with Moore's usual mix of flippant comedy and moral outrage, the case for the prosecution in the left vs. Bush: the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, its Patriot Act clamping down on civil liberties and its cozy relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. Moore is particularly indignant that the President had a chummy White House visit on Sept. 13, 2001, with Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, from whose country 15 of the 19 hijackers had come, and that in the dire days after 9/11, when U.S. flights were grounded, two dozen of Osama bin Laden's relatives were flown out of the country without the FBI being allowed to question them.

Much of the material is familiar. The film buttresses its arguments from reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud and Moore's own best seller Dude, Where's My Country? But Moore, a master propagandist and incorrigible entertainer, knows how to assemble footage in piquant ways. He shows a news clip of Bush on a golf course saying sternly, "We must stop the terror," then reverting to country-club form by adding cheerfully, "Now watch this drive." Moore precedes his section on the Patriot Act by noting that Attorney General John Ashcroft had lost his U.S. Senate seat in 2000 to the recently deceased Governor of Missouri: "Voters preferred the dead guy." There's a shot from a few years back of Moore elbowing his way to talk to then Texas Governor Bush, who recognizes him and says, "Behave yourself, will ya? Go find real work."

Moore's work here is to show the corruptive influence of the war in Iraq: coarsening some Americans abroad, killing others. The film contains previously unseen footage of U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi detainees last Christmas Eve. Toward the end, Moore returns home to Flint to grieve with the parents of a dead soldier, then goes to Washington in a quixotic attempt to badger members of Congress into volunteering their sons and daughters for military service.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is necessarily less personal than Bowling for Columbine and lacks its freewheeling gusto. But it's a fascinating collection of talking points in this election year. In Moore, the American left already had its canniest Bush ambusher, its savviest guerrilla entertainer and its most colorful film-festival ambassador. After Cannes, make that "king."