Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' heats up Cannes

CANNES, France - As promised, Michael Moore lit a powder keg Monday at the Cannes Film Festival: His incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11 riled and disturbed audiences with a relentless critique of the Bush administration in the post-Sept. 11 world.

If Moore can get the movie into U.S. theaters this summer as planned, the title Fahrenheit 9/11 could become a rallying cry in the fall election for voters hoping to see Democratic challenger John Kerry defeat President Bush.

"Will it influence the election? I hope it just influences people to leave the theater and become good citizens," Moore said at a news conference Monday. "I'll leave it to others to decide what kind of impact it's going to have on the election."

The movie reiterates other critics' accusations about the Bush family's financial connections to Saudi oil interests and the family of Osama bin Laden. Moore charges that the White House was asleep at the wheel before the Sept. 11 attacks, then used fear-mongering of future terrorism to muster support for the Iraq war.

Yet Moore - the provocateur behind the Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine, which dissected American gun culture - packages his anti-Bush message in a way that provokes both laughs and gasps.

After making himself the lead figure in his previous documentaries, Moore spends far less time onscreen here.

"The material didn't need the help. It was strong enough already. And I feel that a little bit of me probably goes a long way," Moore said.

It opens with a whimsical recap of the 2000 presidential campaign and the rancor after Florida's photo-finish vote threw the election to Bush over Democratic rival Al Gore.

The Sept. 11 attacks play out with no images of the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Instead, Moore fades to black and provides only the sounds of the planes crashing into the towers, before fading in again on tearful faces of people watching the devastation and a slow-motion montage of floating ash and debris after the buildings collapsed.

Moore examines Saudi financial ties to the Bush family and presents post-Saddam Iraq as an economic development zone for American corporations.

Graver in tone than Bowling for Columbine, the film includes grisly images of dead Iraqi babies and burned children, along with amputees and other U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq.

Even those skeptical of Moore, who has drawn criticism that he skews the truth to fit his arguments, were impressed.

"I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore's work," said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix, saying he found Moore too smug and stunt-driven in the past. "There's no such job as a standup journalist."

Yet in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore presents powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families, Rocchi said.

"This film is at its best when it is most direct and speaks from the heart, when it shows lives torn apart," Rocchi said.

Moore is still arranging for a U.S. distributor. Miramax financed the movie, but parent company Disney blocked the release because of its political overtones.

Fahrenheit 9/11 seems assured of U.S. release, however. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein are buying back the film from Disney and finding another distributor, and Moore hopes to have it in theaters by the Fourth of July weekend.

Harvey Weinstein showed up outside the Cannes theater after the first Fahrenheit 9/11 screening. He declined to speak at length, but as reporters asked if the film would be released, he said, "Have I ever let you down?"

The film takes its title from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which refers to the temperature needed to burn books in an anti-Utopian society.

For all his Bush criticism, Moore said he would like to visit the White House himself.

"I would love to have a White House screening of this film," Moore said. "I would attend it. I would behave myself."

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