Film Review: BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE **** (out of 5)
Relentless, amiable provocateur Michael Moore is commonly called a documentary filmmaker, but his films are really the cinematic equivalent of the personal essay. Agreeably confrontational, filled with Moore’s own assumptions and observations about the world around him, his movies are stream-of-consciousness ruminations on various aspects of what it means to be a thinking American, encouraging laughter at corporate hubris and man-on-the-street ignorance, while nudging viewers toward a sympathetic awareness of the forgotten and downtrodden in the richest country the world has ever known. Subtlety is not his forte, but neither is it the province of his subjects; he often uses sledgehammer tactics, ambushing unwitting targets to force his own dramatic moments, but because he attacks the privileged classes exclusively, he gets away with it. And he should: too many of our debates are being defined and controlled by the privileged, now that a handful of corporations own every media outlet in the country.
With Bowling for Columbine, Moore has raised the level of his own private cinema, making a sincere, feature length examination of gun violence in America, using the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado as a springboard. But the film is not about Columbine, per se; it is an investigation of the culture surrounding the event, Moore asking questions, not only of clueless dinosaurs like Charlton Heston, eminently protected in their guarded estates, but of himself as well, undertaking a quest to discover just what the hell it is that makes a country with everything so recklessly belligerent toward the world, and ultimately its own people. For once, Moore doesn’t let his urge to entertain eclipse his filmmaking instincts: Bowling for Columbine is often hilarious, but it uses laughter as an anesthetic for the painful truths in its frightening real-life images.
A former shooting instructor and champion marksman in his youth, Moore grew up in Michigan, where guns are plentiful and hunting is a way of life. He opens Bowling for Columbine with a brief history of his own naïve involvement in the subculture of firearms, and he actually knows a lot about guns and ammunition, making his evolving critique of weapons and their everyday use all the more believable. As the film unfolds, with initial visits to a Michigan militia camp, then to the creepy home of James Nichols, brother of Oklahoma bombing suspect Terry, Moore finds a superb mechanism for exploring the questions at hand. Genuinely interested in what makes us kill each other, he’s not willing to accept just any answer. He restlessly cuts back and forth across the whole continent, and across key acts of deadly violence from the past decade — Columbine, of course, which receives gruesome attention through uncut footage from the school’s security cameras and police videos of the aftermath, but also Oklahoma City, the South Central LA riots, the Gulf War and last year’s World Trade Center horrors — expanding the focus of his inquiry to debunk all current myths about violence in America.
In Moore’s ambition to be encyclopedic, Bowling for Columbine wanders through many seemingly disconnected side trips, but it is an appropriate strategy for a film that is trying to answer the unanswerable. For instance, Moore cites the famous statistics about yearly handgun deaths in other developed nations, from Japan to Europe to Australia, and naturally he finds people elsewhere are dying in the mere tens or hundreds from flying bullets, while the American toll runs to a little over 11,000 people annually. We all know it’s because of the proliferation of easily accessible weapons and ammunition, right? Wrong: thousands of Canadians own guns, they just don’t freakin’ shoot each other to settle parking disputes and marital squabbles. They don’t reach for a weapon at the slightest provocation (even when they see an American camera crew approaching).
What is it, then, about America? Bowling for Columbine doesn’t give a hard and fast solution. Moore visits with National Rifle Association president Heston, in an interview that makes Moses look all-too-human, mean and small; then he draws loose parallels between the presence of Lockheed-Martin, just down the road from Columbine, and the hopelessness that Gen-Y teenagers feel living in the perpetual shadow of adult hypocrisy. For much of the film he seems to be casting about for a direction. But finally, brilliantly, uncomfortably, Moore turns the challenge on the viewer, asking why, exactly, are we so doggoned afraid of everything, everything, especially our friends and neighbors.
Moore takes the media severely to task, and rightly so, for promoting nothing but violence, sudden death, and beer on newscast after newscast, and on ludicrous “reality” TV shows like Cops. But even worse, he finds that Canadians, by contrast, are extremely cavalier about locking their doors, and about letting black men and other kinds of suspect people walk around unmolested on their streets. Just as in previous films, Moore deconstructs the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ideology of corporate America, but here he digs deeper than ever into the unfathomable gulf between rich and poor in the United States, a country that has always insisted on Social Darwinism as its guiding principle, no matter who was in office.
The problem isn’t disaffected youth, who live everywhere, or boneheaded presidents using military strikes on foreigners to deflect attention from the economy, and it certainly isn’t provocative rock singers pushing middle class buttons. In one of the film’s best moments, Moore interviews Marilyn Manson, who was castigated by the media and right-wing extremists when Columbine first happened, because it was learned the killers had listened to his music. Manson turns out to be the most articulate, intelligent person interviewed in the film, quietly and succinctly listing Moore’s major themes for him, apparently without prompting.
Bowling for Columbine reveals an America that is all too willing to sacrifice anything and everything for short-term profits, easy answers and the bottom line, including and most significantly its citizens. We’ll sell our grandmothers for a sliver of the pie.Such a conclusion is not particularly news, except for those who still buy into the propaganda that we can be anything we want to be, if only we work hard enough. The sad reality is, most people still live lives of quiet desperation while the rich have continued to become richer and fewer than ever, and the social machinery of inequity grinds away unimpeded. Inner city women are bussed miles from home to serve the wealthy, yet they still can’t afford to pay their own rent or be with their children, and the U.S. remains the only industrialized nation on the planet that refuses to provide healthcare for its citizens. Richest country in the world won’t even bother to take care of its own sick people. We’re a land only Ebeneezer Scrooge could love.
Bowling for Columbine has been winning over audiences at film festivals around the world, particularly at Cannes, where it was given a special 55th anniversary judges prize, the first documentary allowed into competition in over four decades. I was able to see the movie on the closing night of the Denver International Film Festival, where a capacity audience of several thousand cheered on the film’s daring intelligence. Afterward, Moore fielded questions from the audience, and brought out two young men who survived the Columbine massacre (and who appear in the film’s most uplifting sequence) to share the stage with him. It was clear that Michael Moore has been transformed by making this movie, which he began planning the day after the Columbine tragedy. His replies to the audience remained pithy, his attitude still jaunty self-righteousness, but there was a humility in his acceptance of the standing ovations, a sense that he is doing something worthwhile with his clout as an entertainer that is new to Michael Moore, a welcome gravity both in person and on the screen.Bowling for Columbine leads us by the shoulders to the edge, forces us to look out over the abyss and face our own culpability in an unsafe America, and to come to grips with why we let the news media and the politicians bully us into believing there’s danger on every street corner. The film is flawed to be sure, but it’s also incalculably rich with observations generally kept out of “mainstream“ discourse. It is possibly a great movie; if it is, it is because no cherished assumption gets out alive, whether it’s from the right-wing or the left, urban legend or official story. Bowling for Columbine reframes the debate, suggesting that if the answers haven’t been found yet, it’s because thus far the questions have been wrong.
As Moore himself explained at the screening in Denver, discussing and portraying violence honestly, in all its ugliness, is not the same thing as condoning it. When a well-meaning woman from the audience asked if he ever planned to make a film that promotes nonviolence, he said, “I think I just did.”
Bowling for Columbine
produced, written & directed by Michael Moore; director of photography, Brian Danitz, Michael McDonough; edited by Kurt Engfehr; music by Jeff Gibbs
with: Michael Moore; featuring George W. Bush, Dick Clark, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Manson
2 hr.; United Artists, rated R
release date: October 11
Notes:
The title is most likely a pun on the phrase “gunning for…”
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
