Irresponsible.

Well, I finally got around to seeing Michael Moore's celebrated opus, Fahrenheit 9/11. I have but one reaction:

Are you kidding me?

This was the source of so much controversy? This film actually received the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival? This was the movie that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and others claimed was a "must-see?" Someone, anyone took this mess seriously and found value in it? Again, are you kidding me?

Now to be clear, no money went into Moore's pocket as the result of me witnessing this trainwreck of a film. It was on cable, so it was going to run anyway. After having learned of the movie's storyline upon its release and having run into a celebration of Michael Moore's irresponsible films overseas, I resolved to do nothing to enrich this man. I kept my word.

But I was curious, it was on and I did watch the damn thing from beginning to end. Although I was frequently challenged not to turn it off, I stayed the course and watched, desperately seeking something of value. From the petulant opening where Moore claims Bush stole the 2000 election because a family member worked for FoxNews (?) to the ludicrous portrayal of idyllic pre-war Iraq to the shameful concluding scenes where he brazenly uses the grieving mother of a soldier who died in Iraq as human prop, I found myself thoroughly irritated. But beyond that, my overriding reaction was one of being completely underwhelmed. This film is thoroughly devoid of value.

I won't regale you with all of the errors, smears, unsupportable implications portrayed as absolute fact, carefully edited videotape and lazy argumentation. The film is simply riddled with errata and most have been enumerated and discussed elsewhere.

Rather, I'd like to write about the film in the overall. First of all, as I said above I am really quite shocked that this film received as much attention as it did. It yields little in the way of new information or insights. When it does purport to raise earth-shattering insights, they are of the ilk that bubbles up largely through a labyrinth of looney leftwing websites that specialize in advancing conspiracy theories. Surely this plays well among the peanut gallery, but the "gotcha" grandstanding fails to live up to a strong documentary tradition which includes The Fog of War, Control Room and The Trials of Henry Kissinger. Instead of reaching for those etheral heights, Fahrenheit 9/11 settles in comfortably among Bulworth, Wag the Dog and Bob Roberts as pure political satire.

Sourcing on the film is extremely weak. Washington Congressman Jim McDermott gets the bulk of the "analytic" airtime. Jim McDermott? You mean the same Jim McDermott who became a puppet of Saddam Hussein during an ill-advised pre-war trip to Iraq? Except for two or three clips of Richard Clarke, there are no terrorism, international affairs, Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan or oil experts quoted anywhere in the film. None. While edited Bush Administration video is often used to great cinematic effect, we get virtually no meaningful analysis from subject-matter experts who would allow us to place the administration video in any sort of context whatsoever. And it's not like anti-war experts aren't out there. I recently saw this film, which received far less acclaim and was likely filmed on a much smaller budget. While its claims are equally outlandish, at least experts like David Albright, Robert Baer and Larry Johnson are heavily leveraged. In short, for someone levelling charges of high crimes, Moore's support is extremely weak. This is just flabby, intellectual laziness. Consider the source.

But the predominant reaction I had was to the irresponsible treatment of this subject matter. These are grave issues and serious charges. They are deserving of earnestness and intellectual rigor. But Moore impugns his film and himself by continually alternating between making a documentary and groveling for cheap laughs. He vacillates between somber tones when dealing with 9/11 or grieving parents and pure schlock when portraying the war in Afghanistan as an episode of "Bonanza" in which the faces of Bush, Blair, Cheney and Rumsfeld are superimposed over the comboys of the Ponderosa. We see a similar disconnect in the treatment of American soldiers throughout the film. On the one hand, Moore argues that our heroic soldiers are the sad victims of the Bush Administration's heartless militarism. And yet at several junctures in the film, Moore actually ridicules American troops through a cartoonish portrayal of them as moronic, buck-toothed red-staters who get their jollies by killing and desecrating the bodies of dead Iraqis. How can this blatant contradiction be explained, much less overlooked?

In sum, this film doesn't know what it wants to be. One the one-hand it seeks to be taken seriously as a well-researched documentary. On the other, it aspires to light-hearted satire. The result is that it fails on both counts. The film does not hold up to intellectual scrutiny and it fails as a satire because a) the subject matter isn't funny and b)the satirical moments are often contradicted by the weak efforts to make legitimate points.

This thing won a Palme d'Or and created heated controversy? How? It must be more a tribute to its timeliness in tapping in to anti-Bush and anti-American sentiment, than to anything contributed by the film itself. To be controversial it must demonstrate at least some intellectual rigor. And yet this film has remarkably little. Sorry, I just don't get it.

At the end of the day, I don't really care much about what Michael Moore has to say. I don't lose much sleep over it. Much like I don't care what Al Franken, Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh have to say. But last year, I traveled to Europe and Africa and I came across a lot of people who had seen Moore's films and read his books. He's a kind of cult figure overseas and what I find very sad is that he is viewed as something of a scholar and a paragon of "the truth." Most don't understand that he's a political satirist. Although many, or even most, Americans can see through Moore's flimsy arguments I worry that those consuming his message overseas are adopting Moore's films as the unvarnished truth. In the sense that he does get worldwide distribution, I find it highly irresponsible for him to make films like this. If he is going to level such serious charges, is it not incumbent upon him to support his accusations? Did he ever give any thought to the impact F 9/11 might have as a terrorist recruiting tool? Oh, that's right. Based upon his ridicule of the American public's concerns about terrorism, Moore must not worry about the implications of such a hyped threat.