The beautiful people were back. After a lackluster 2003 session of mediocre films and low celebrity wattage, this year's Cannes Film Festival atoned in substance and style. It boasted a stronger slate of movies (potent new works from Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou and Jean-Luc Godard) and burst with star power under the brilliant Riviera sun. Waving from the red-carpeted steps of the Grand Palais were your Hankses and Diazes, your Brad Pitts and Mike Myerses--enough representatives of the rich and famous to fill a Cabala convention.
For all those eight-figure earners, the largest presence at this French film fete was a fellow from Flint, Mich., who's usually seen in a scruffy beard and duck-hunter couture. Michael Moore was prowling the Riviera, and this time the game he aimed at was George W. Bush. Bull's-eye! His Fahrenheit 9/11 captured Cannes's highest prize, the Palme d'Or, from a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. "What have you done?" the winner asked in benign shock. "You just did this to mess with me."
Moore should be used to prizes by now. His 2002 Bowling for Columbine earned $58 million worldwide and an Oscar nod that Moore turned into a decisive media event when, in his acceptance speech, he scolded the President for invading Iraq. So Cannes was primed for his latest movie Molotov cocktail. Its first screening, on a Monday at 8 a.m., got total team news coverage; a dozen or so radio and TV crews circled the U.S. critics to get their early reaction as Miramax Films co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose Disney bosses had forbidden him to release the film, paced nearby and chortled, "They say I've lost my edge? Have I lost my edge?" He had not. He spent the rest of the week negotiating with a flock of U.S. distributors hoping to profit from the film's marketable notoriety.
Left-wing documentaries are nothing new. In fact, with the exception of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-rally film Triumph of the Will, it's hard to think of a right-wing documentary. Nor was Moore alone in his obsession with the Republican elite. Among the festival screenings were the documentary Bush's Brain (about adviser Karl Rove) and a fact-based drama, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. But Fahrenheit 9/11 had all the hot press. And it more than lived up to its advance rep.
The film details, with Moore's usual mix of flippant comedy and moral outrage, the case for the prosecution in the left vs. Bush: the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, its Patriot Act clamping down on civil liberties and its cozy relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. Moore is particularly indignant that the President had a chummy White House visit on Sept. 13, 2001, 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, two dozen of Osama bin Laden's relatives were flown out of the country without the FBI being allowed to question them.