Fahren­heit ¹¹⁄₉

Michael Moore is seri­ous­ly cheesed off. Noth­ing new there. But some­thing about America’s for­mer cap-wear­ing cur­mud­geon in-chief seems dif­fer­ent this time around. He’s less, well, cur­mud­geon­ly than usu­al. His agi­tat­ing… not quite as agi­tat­ed as before. Could it be that this fire­brand doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er, this surly scourge of the polit­i­cal elite, has mel­lowed? Or has he sim­ply become jad­ed to the point of lethargy?

No. It quick­ly becomes appar­ent that what we are see­ing is a man whose sense of self-worth has been com­plete­ly reju­ve­nat­ed. A man re-enter­ing the pub­lic are­na with the relaxed swag­ger of some­one embold­ened – to an almost unbear­able degree – by the knowl­edge that they were right all along: about Trump, about Hilary, about Oba­ma, about the whole sor­ry state of things. This is the Sec­ond Com­ing of Michael Moore. Please form an order­ly queue for the rapture.

Moore loves to say ​‘I told you so’, and he takes great pride in remind­ing us that he called this one ear­ly. The film opens on Elec­tion Night, Novem­ber 9^th, 2016. While the cham­pagne corks are pop­ping in the Clin­ton camp, there’s a funer­al atmos­phere over at Trump HQ as the exit polls seem to con­firm what every­one already knew. Then the results begin to trick­le in. Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, Flori­da and Michi­gan turn red. Sud­den­ly the mood switch­es. Team Hilary is stunned, their sure bet hav­ing snatched defeat from the jaws of vic­to­ry. This, Moore has­tens to add, is pre­cise­ly what he warned us would happen.

Then comes a star­tling admis­sion. Twen­ty years ago, Moore had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to chas­tise Trump on live day­time tele­vi­sion, but instead decid­ed to give him an easy ride. Of course, he wasn’t to know that the man he shared cosy small talk with on ​‘The Roseanne Show’ would one day find him­self sit­ting in the Oval Office. Yet the inclu­sion of this clip serves a func­tion beyond eas­ing Moore’s own guilt. As he points out, Trump endorsed Bill Clin­ton through­out the ​’90s and even switched alle­giance to the Democ­rats in the ear­ly 2000s. And it was Slick Willie who encour­aged his old golf bud­dy to run for Pres­i­dent – though if you ask Moore, Gwen Ste­fani is real­ly to blame.

Fahren­heit ¹¹⁄₉ sees Moore once again rail against the estab­lish­ment, tak­ing aim at a laun­dry list of tar­gets in a bid to high­light the gross incom­pe­tence and rank hypocrisy that have left hard-work­ing ordi­nary Amer­i­cans more dis­en­fran­chised and divid­ed than ever. Trump didn’t drop out of the sky, posits Moore, he rose up through the cracks of a sys­tem rigged in favour of a pow­er­ful few. Pop­ulism is symp­to­matic of a break­down of a tru­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­ra­cy sys­tem. So if Amer­i­ca is a bust­ed flush, how does Moore pro­pose fix­ing it?

To his cred­it he doesn’t offer any easy solu­tions, instead look­ing to the next gen­er­a­tion for answers. Seg­ments on gun vio­lence and grass­roots activism are where the film hits its stride. Moore checks in with sur­vivors of the Park­land school shoot­ing and cur­rent mem­bers of ​‘Nev­er Again MSD’, the stu­dent-led gun con­trol advo­ca­cy group behind the ​‘March For Our Lives’ demon­stra­tion. He also meets sev­er­al new faces on the polit­i­cal scene (all Democ­rats, an encour­ag­ing pro­por­tion of whom are women), and a con­tin­gent of West Vir­ginia pub­lic school teach­ers who suc­cess­ful­ly nego­ti­at­ed a deal for high­er wages and ben­e­fits ear­li­er this year fol­low­ing a state-wide strike.

Moore can’t help indulging his worst ten­den­cies though. At one point he parks a water truck out­side the gat­ed state­ly home of Rick Sny­der – the Repub­li­can Gov­er­nor Moore blames for the ongo­ing water cri­sis in Flint, Michi­gan, the director’s home­town – and pro­ceeds to give his front lawn a good soak­ing. Lat­er, Moore strides into the state­house to make a citizen’s arrest, but doesn’t make it past secu­ri­ty. Both are cute stunts that say more about Moore’s pro­cliv­i­ty for self-aggran­dis­ing cer­e­mo­ny than his abil­i­ty to rig­or­ous­ly scru­ti­nise his adversaries.

While he remains unabashed­ly one-sided and often over-sim­pli­fies com­plex issues, there is no deny­ing the pow­er of Moore’s dis­tinct brand of provoca­tive info­tain­ment. He may labour the point at times, but this is – for bet­ter and for worse – the same film­mak­er who won the Oscar for Best Doc­u­men­tary in 2002 for his anti-gun polemic, Bowl­ing for Columbine, and the Palme d’Or in 2004 for Fahren­heit ⁹⁄₁₁, his sear­ing take­down of the Bush administration’s ​‘War on Ter­ror’. The lat­ter is still the high-gross­ing doc­u­men­tary in history.

If Fahren­heit ¹¹⁄₉ feels com­par­a­tive­ly scat­ter­shot in its approach, less exact in its indig­na­tion, you sus­pect that’s part­ly because Moore knows it’s vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble to lay a glove on Trump. The real­i­ty is that the 45^th POTUS has ren­dered self-pub­li­cis­ing polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors and satirists like Moore large­ly irrel­e­vant. (You need look no fur­ther than 2016’s Michael Moore in Trum­p­Land for evi­dence of this.) Yet in the brief moments when he climbs down off his soap­box and lets oth­ers do the talk­ing, Moore shows us that there are rea­sons to be hope­ful in these strange, uncer­tain times.