Quotes of the Day

Michael Moore has never had trouble drawing a crowd. His cheerfully angry left-wing books sell millions of copies in the U.S. and around the globe, and his Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine earned $58 million worldwide. Last week the fellow from Flint, Michigan, who's usually seen in a scruffy beard and duck-hunter couture, was prowling the Riviera in a tuxedo jacket and baggy black trousers, and this time the game he was aiming at was George W. Bush.

Cannes was primed for Moore's latest movie Molotov cocktail, Fahrenheit 9/11, long before it won the coveted Palme D'Or award on Saturday evening. The film's first screening, on a Monday at 8 a.m., got blanket news coverage; a dozen or so radio and TV crews circled the U.S. critics to get their early reaction. Meanwhile, Miramax Films co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose Disney bosses had forbidden him to release the film, was dealmaking with a flock of U.S. distributors hoping to profit from the film's marketable notoriety.

Fahrenheit 9/11 more than lived up to its advance rep. The film details, in Moore's usual mix of flippant comedy and moral outrage, the case for the prosecution in the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, its Patriot Act clamp on civil liberties and its cozy relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. Moore is particularly indignant that two days after Sept. 11, 2001, the President had a chummy White House visit 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, dozens 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 many TV and print sources, including 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 precedes his section on the Patriot Act by noting that Attorney General John Ashcroft had lost his U.S. Senate seat in 2000 to a recently deceased incumbent: "Voters preferred the dead guy." He shows footage of Bush clowning at his desk in March 2003, moments before giving the televised address that announced the invasion of Iraq. He shows a newsclip 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." There's a shot from a few years back of Moore elbowing his way toward then-Governor Bush, who recognizes him and says, "Behave yourself, will ya? Go and find real work."

Moore's goal here is to show the corruptive influence of the war on Iraq: coarsening the American spirit at home and abroad, killing others. The film contains previously unseen footage of U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi detainees last Christmas Eve. One of the men in custody apparently has an erection under his blanket; a soldier swats it and says, "Ali Baba has a hard-on," while another G.I. shouts, in a schoolboy's merry derision, "You touched his dick!" Toward the end of the film, Moore returns home to Flint to grieve with the parents of a dead soldier, then goes to Washington in a quixotic attempt to badger 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 has its canniest Bush ambusher, its savviest guerrilla entertainer, and its most colorful ambassador to filmdom's biggest annual bash.

• RICHARD CORLISS
• Michael Moore walks off with the Palme d'Or