The Entertainer

Michael Moore is many things–filmmaker, TV-show producer, best-selling author, hall-packing lecturer–and has been called many other things by his detractors. But first and foremost, he’s a movie star.

The numbers for his past three pictures prove that: Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko have together earned more than $300 million worldwide. Not all this boodle can have come from people who agree with his populist-lefty agenda. No, they pay to see him play “Michael Moore”: a heavyset fellow with a doofus grin, alternately laughing and badgering but perennially at the center of attention. For all his girth, Moore fits the mold of the little guy in classic Hollywood movies. Like Jefferson Smith and Rocky Balboa, he bucks the odds and takes on the power élite: the gun lobby in Columbine, the occupation of Iraq in Fahrenheit, the health-care industry in Sicko.

Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, which goes nationwide Oct. 2, is his most vigorous, rollicking, broadly ambitious work yet. Not satisfied with condemning the housing and banking crises of the past year, he expands the story of the financial collapse into an epic of malfeasance–capital crimes on an international scale. The movie also has the requisite Moore grandstanding scenes: attempting a citizen’s arrest of AIG executives, parking a Brink’s truck in front of banking establishments to retrieve the bailout billions they received, wrapping the New York Stock Exchange building in yellow tape that reads CRIME SCENE. The Underdog telling off the overlord: it’s a fixture of earnest Hollywood drama.

Except that Moore isn’t making works of fiction (though his critics, on the left and the right, might say he is). He’s achieved his eminence in the documentary–that noble, educational film form that most moviegoers find as appealing as a visit to the dentist. In the kingdom of cinema genres, the documentary falls somewhere between food taster and peasant advocate.

But from the start, Moore showed that a political doc could be entertaining. Each of his films is at least as interested in evoking emotion as in marshaling data; Moore uses cartoons and farcical collisions of images to sell his sagas. To the standard regimen of interviews, film clips and pie charts, he had the showman’s savvy to add an extra ingredient: himself. Voilà ! The docucomedy, with a front man as prominent as the subjects he investigates.

Thus Moore made himself into, as the ad for Capitalism proclaims, “the most feared filmmaker in America.” Certainly the most provocative: there are nearly as many movies attacking Moore (mostly docs but also David Zucker’s anti-Moore comedy-satire An American Carol) as there are films directed by him. Yet to his kind of movie star, any mention, whether deferential or defamatory, is free publicity. Not that Moore needs others to do the work he’s so accomplished at. He was the star guest on the second episode of Jay Leno’s new prime-time show, flacking for Capitalism and singing two verses of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Michael Moore, pop star!

Moore’s starmaking apparatus was already in place in his first film, 1989’s Roger & Me. It starts with home movies of the child Mike and his blue-collar family in their hometown of Flint, Mich., and follows the adult Mike as he stalks General Motors chairman Roger Smith in the hopes of confronting Smith for closing the auto plant in Flint and turning the city into a Hooverville. Along with critical praise, Moore earned charges of twisting the facts and distorting the sequence of events. Either way, the movie made him famous.

Now, in Capitalism, he’s back outside the gates of GM–which, after declaring bankruptcy, was far less solvent than Moore. Talk about the little guy triumphing over the system: somehow, in the past 20 years, the free-enterprise system has been kinder to the agitprop indie filmmaker than to his auto-giant adversary. A man who made his career attacking corporate America has become a pretty big business himself.

Indeed, Moore is the General Motors–the old, powerful version–of the doc community. Other people make nonfiction political films, and good ones. Leslie and Andrew Cockburn’s American Casino is a scrupulous study of the home-mortgage crisis; it shifts between Wall Street critics and the working-class folks whose lives were ruined as they lost their homes. But Casino, which plays like a superior edition of the PBS series Frontline, can now be seen in just a few theaters. It seems that doc films can thrive only if they star Michael Moore.

So audiences are attracted to and entertained by Moore–but what is the political effect of his star quality? In Capitalism, after cogently diagnosing the collusion of Wall Street and Congress in cooking this mess, he ends not by urging tough legislation but by calling for community activism and labor-union muscle. The problem is that movies, even Michael Moore movies, aren’t an efficient method for rousing a constituency. Fahrenheit 9/11 didn’t do half the damage to George W. Bush that the Swift Boat smears did to John Kerry. Sicko couldn’t change lawmakers’ minds on health care; a few shouters at town-hall meetings did.

No question that millions of people will see this film. Then they’ll most likely remember Moore and forget about the bailout. Hey, folks, that’s entertainment!