Michael Moore's blistering critique of the Bush administration in toto and its War on Terror in particular (just in time for the 2004 presidential campaign, too) is at bottom a pair of devil's horns drawn on the head of Dubya. But if Moore were only making fun, he'd only be Leno or Letterman. He sees the big picture (sometimes too big to be easily grasped: the serpentine connections between the Bushes and the Saudis), and he sees also the little picture (the police infiltration of a middle-class protest group calling itself Peace Fresno, or the bottle of breast milk stopped at an airport checkpoint). He often stoops to frivolity (a Dragnet montage to illustrate proper interrogation techniques, a couple of promo spots for at-home panic rooms and take-to-work parachutes, John Ashcroft's full-chested rendition of his self-composed "Let the Eagle Soar"); and at times he stretches himself to the utmost gravity (a mother's grief over the loss of her soldier son, grisly war footage you won't see on American television). The shifts in scale and in tone are as stimulating as they are startling. And finally, to secure the ties to his earlier work, Moore revisits the fear theme, or in other words the mind-control theme, from Bowling for Columbine, and inevitably he revisits his hometown of Flint, Michigan (see Roger and Me as well as Columbine), a prime spot for military recruiters to round up cannon fodder from among the unemployed. Moore himself -- his rebellious rumpliness, his defiant untidiness, his cultivated slobbiness -- is less on view in this one (though he is continuously in our ear in that singsongy, snide, sardonic tone of voice), and his relative scarcity on screen could even be seen as a shortcoming insofar as it signals a fall-off in original material and a heavier reliance on found footage. Found, that is, or scrounged or wheedled or donated. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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