“Fahrenheit 11/9” and “Colette,” Reviewed | The New Yorker

“Fahrenheit 11/9” and “Colette,” Reviewed | The New Yorker
The Current Cinema
October 1, 2018 Issue
The Vexing Analogies of “Fahrenheit 11/9”
Michael Moore’s new film about the rise of Trump represents an opportunity missed.


By Anthony Lane




Michael Moore’s saddened, irate film tries to understand Trump’s victory.Illustration by Keith Negley



The question that Michael Moore sets out to answer in his new documentary, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” is a simple one. He poses it in his trademark voice-over—a companionable croon, surprisingly soft, as if he were sitting next to us at a bar and cradling a beer. The question, complete with dramatic pauses, runs as follows: “How. The fuck. Did this happen?” By “this,” he means the election of Donald Trump.

The title of the film glances backward to “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004), in which Moore asked (or, if you’re a fan of his, convincingly showed) how the Iraq War had sprung from the attack on the Twin Towers. This old-fashioned faith in historical cause and effect recurs in the latest movie, although, in the case of Trump, we are apparently dealing with layer upon layer of causes. The soil from which he bloomed was richly dunged.

The first cause, according to Moore, is Gwen Stefani. Once Trump learned that she was paid more handsomely for “The Voice” than he was for “The Apprentice,” he flexed his celebrity muscles by pretending to be Presidential material. The pretense stuck. This explanation—that Trump was somehow mortified into political ambition—is oddly persuasive, though other commentators have traced it, no less plausibly, to Barack Obama’s lampooning of him at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, in 2011, and the psychology behind the claim is nothing new. The best example comes from “The Red and the Black,” published in 1830, in which Stendhal’s intemperate hero shrugs off the arm of Madame de Rênal, who is in love with him, and is chided for his rudeness. The look on his face contains “a vague hope of the most terrible revenge,” and the author adds, in an unforgettable aside, “It is doubtless to such moments of humiliation that we owe men like Robespierre.”

So, what else allowed Trump’s revolution to take root? Moore, like other despairing souls, rails against the Electoral College, and also against what he views as the Democratic Party’s undemocratic scorn for the preferences of its own members at the county level. But the movie is most effective when it gets its hands dirty, and wet, by delving into a scandal in Flint, Michigan—Moore’s birthplace, and the setting for “Roger & Me” (1989), the movie that put him on the map. Back then, his theme was the laying off of workers at General Motors, and, specifically, the dark deeds of the G.M. chairman, Roger Smith. Now Moore turns his attention to Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, and to the polluting of Flint’s public water supply during his tenure. Drinking water has been poisoned with lead, and Moore presents us with weeping children and other victims: the oldest trick in the book, for any documentarian, though it still carries emotional clout.

Unchanged, too, is Moore’s habit of strewing his argument with stunts—marching toward Snyder’s office with handcuffs, say, in a bid to make a citizen’s arrest, or parking a truck full of Flint water outside the governor’s mansion and gleefully hosing the front lawn. These days, however, such gambits seem a touch weary and fruitless, and the movie is burdened by a larger problem. What, exactly, has the cautionary tale from Michigan got to do with Trump? Well, for Moore, it’s a blueprint: one rich guy’s knack for befouling the neighborhood foretells another’s ability to mess up the land of the free. Not that we have a chance to ponder the logic of that link, for the movie is already darting off in another direction and proposing its next analogy: if you’re wondering where America’s current craze for discourtesy, outrage, and scapegoating might lead, look to nineteen-thirties Germany. For anybody who doesn’t quite get the point, Moore hammers it home like a tent peg. We are offered footage of a Nuremberg rally, with the Führer’s ululations replaced by those of Donald Trump.

As a rule, once Hitler is slipped into any conversation, it’s time to back away and pour yourself a drink, but Moore’s jeremiads are as contagious as ever, and you feel the eagerness—at once amused and horrified—with which he lays out the parallels between the Nazi era and ours. He’s in distinguished company; Luis Buñuel, in his memoirs, recalls that, near the start of the Second World War, an abridged version of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” was shown in New York to two great comic directors, Chaplin and René Clair. Responses were mixed. Clair was appalled, Buñuel says, but Chaplin laughed, “once so hard that he actually fell off his chair.”

“Fahrenheit 11/9,” too, is a barrel of laughs, not because it’s particularly funny but because the barrel is packed with people laughing, mostly for reasons that make you squirm. We watch George Stephanopoulos and his guests, on ABC, cackle at the preposterous notion that Trump might ever become President; we hear friendly giggles as Leslie Moonves, asked about the wave of interest in Trump, admits that “it may not be good for America but it’s darn good for CBS”; and we see a clip of Trump being asked, on a talk show, what he has in common with his daughter Ivanka and replying, “I was going to say ‘sex,’ ” before being smothered by shrieks of nervous delight from the audience. Notice that all of these scenes come from television, the hot bright boudoir where entertainment and governance make out. And people still profess to be amazed that a TV host could end up as the Commander-in-Chief.


As for solving the crisis, Michael Moore has a revelation up his sleeve. “Let me share with you a fact that has never been stated in the press, or reported on the nightly news, or even spoken amongst ourselves,” he declares, with a conjurer’s flourish. And the big reveal? “The United States of America is a leftist country.” Various items of evidence are submitted as proof: statistics on health care and welfare; demonstrations in favor of gun control organized in February by survivors of the Parkland school shootings; and, in the same month, the successful strike that was called by teachers in West Virginia. All that is required for the dislodging of the status quo is a natural gush of political complaint, or so the movie would have us believe. What it neglects to mention is that, in the 2016 election, Michigan went for Trump, who was also backed by a startling 68.5 per cent of West Virginian voters. The gushers had ideas of their own.

“Fahrenheit 11/9” is saddened, irate, and scattershot, edited with snap and crackle by Doug Abel and Pablo Proenza, and stirred by Moore’s rueful awareness that, in an emergency, the call to action should override the pleasures of irreverence. More hunting, less snark. But the film will neither change minds nor soothe embittered hearts, I fear, and an opportunity has been missed. Flint is to Moore as Baltimore is to Barry Levinson or Brooklyn to Spike Lee, and I can’t help wishing that Moore, who knows every inch of his home turf, had embedded with a family of Trump loyalists—not to catch them out, as he seeks to do with Snyder, or to stand in awe of them, as he does with the Parkland students, but purely to trace the source of the family’s grievances and the everyday progress of its hopes. After all, he did much the same with autoworkers in “Roger & Me.” That movie, incidentally, earned praise from an unexpected quarter. “I liked it,” Donald Trump once said, before adding, “I hope he never does one on me.”


Given that Colette, the French novelist who lived at full pelt and died in 1954, was prized for the feline opulence of her prose and for the unclipped sharpness of her social claws, it seems only fitting that a film about her should begin with a cat on a bed. “Colette,” directed by Wash Westmoreland, stars Keira Knightley in the title role; Dominic West as her first husband; Fiona Shaw as her mother; and Denise Gough, dashingly dressed in men’s clothes, as Missy, one of Colette’s many female lovers. There is also a thoughtful French bulldog, played by an actor named Life.