![]() ![]() is on the verge of a fascist takeover and at the same time on the cusp of a progressive revolution. Moore is still plenty present in Fahrenheit 11/9, especially as the movie builds to its most sweeping argument: that the U.S. The movie’s strongest sections cede the floor to the progressive activists and insurgent political figures whom he paints as the country’s best, and perhaps last, hope for salvation. (He still keeps the habit of using phrases like, “We in Michigan,” as if he were still a humble Rust Belt working man and not a multimillionaire media personality-one who, as he admits here, had at points in his career rubbed elbows with Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, and Trump himself.) But the movie’s strongest sections cede the floor to the progressive activists and insurgent political figures whom he paints as the country’s best, and perhaps last, hope of salvation. There’s no equivalent in the new movie to Cindy Sheehan, whose grief and anger over her son’s death in the Iraq war vindicated Moore’s sometimes-shaky claim to acting as a stand-in for voices that the mainstream media often ignores. The secret of Fahrenheit 9/11’s success was Moore’s atypical willingness to stay behind the camera and off the soundtrack and let others’ stories take precedence over his own. The question of how we got here-or, as Moore puts it, “How the fuck did this happen?”-isn’t one that can be answered with glib anecdotes, no matter how cleverly he puts them across.įortunately, Fahrenheit 11/9 isn’t a successor to Moore’s record-breaking Fahrenheit 9/11-still by some distance the highest-grossing documentary of all time-in name alone. But it also stems from Moore’s weakness for reducing political and cultural currents to a clash of personalities, one of which is always his. It’s the kind of thing that feels like it might be true, especially when you’re in a movie and can’t whip out your phone to check it, and it serves Moore’s primary purpose, which is reassuring viewers that they’re not about to sit through about 130 minutes rehashing familiar talking points. Moore puts forth the notion that it was Trump’s jealousy over Stefani’s higher salary on fellow NBC reality series The Voice that inspired the initial mock announcement of his presidential run, and that it was only after Trump’s free-associative racism prompted the network to remove him as host of The Apprentice instead of giving him a raise that Trump was forced to run for real. (It did not.) The movie’s revisitation of the hours when the confident predictions of Hillary Clinton’s victory slid into the horrified recognition of Donald Trump’s victory is stomach-churning-those who remember that night as a thrilling surprise rather than a world-threatening catastrophe will find no purchase here-and it slides right into one of Moore’s characteristic overreaches: that the road to Trump’s presidency begins with Gwen Stefani. Fahrenheit 11/9 begins in that eye-rolling vein, with an election night recap and a “Was it all a dream?” callback to the movie’s titular predecessor, a movie that Moore similarly promised would help oust a sitting Republican president. ![]()
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