TIFF ’18: Fahrenheit 11/9

**/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw Michael Moore is an often-terrible filmmaker and a repugnant human being. His films are scattershot and on the whole unhelpful. In a few meandering minutes of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he notes that members of Trump’s inner circle have invested in his films and that when given the opportunity to hold Trump’s feet to the fire in a public forum, he played the Jimmy Fallon. He appears to be owning that he’s part of this disaster, but it’s not clear, ultimately, what the fuck he’s on about. Moore also spends time with the teen survivors of the Parkland, FL shooting, in what seems like an attempt to borrow the glow of their youthful activism; with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for probably the same purpose; and then he spends some time doing his stunt bullshit by spraying a tanker full of Flint water onto the governor of Flint’s lawn. What works in the film is his focus in on how the DNC actively betrayed the will of the people by overriding primary results in states like West Virginia, Michigan, and Montana in throwing the presidential nomination to the legendarily unpopular Hillary Clinton. He reminds that during the heat of the Flint crisis, President Obama flew in, performed the stunt of drinking Flint water (he didn’t), then told a folksy story of how he probably ate some lead when he was a little kid and, shucks, he turned out fine. These moments are vital because they show why thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of devoted Democrat voters decided their votes didn’t matter and, indeed, that Democrats cared about the poor exactly as much as Republicans do. The problem isn’t that Trump is who he has always obviously been, right there out in the open (and proud of his vulgarity and ugliness); the problem is that the entrenched political establishment on every side had fallen into complacency and lost interest in any class other than their own. Outside of that thread, the rest of it, including an extended comparison of Trump to Hitler, is just Moore being the Left’s Rush Limbaugh. When preaching to the choir, best to turn the camera on the choir: Fahrenheit 11/9 is gold when it’s shaming the Left. I wish he’d spent more time doing that. Programme: TIFF Docs