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June 27, 2004

A TALE OF TWO MOVIES: FAHRENHEIT 9/11 VS PASSION OF THE CHRIST

A.O. Scott, New York Times:

F9/11: Mr. Moore's populist instincts have never been sharper...he is a credit to the republic.

Passion: Gibson has exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end.

F9/11: Received both the first prize and the longest continuous standing ovation in the history of the Cannes Film Festival and it wasn't because of some cliched French antipathy to America.

Passion: Lacks artistic and even spiritual balance.

F9/11: A masterful job of ridiculing the personality, intellect and employment resumé of George W. Bush ... could well become the docu-equivalent of "The Passion of the Christ" and even affect the presidential election.

Passion: Despite Gibson's claim that he's finally telling "the true story," his movie strikes me as less faithful to the Gospels than the earlier Christ movies. Crammed full of scenes and dialogue and minor characters that he's completely made up.

F9/11: I was in tears after first seeing "Fahrenheit" at Cannes.

Passion: The most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II.

F9/11: Should be seen because it takes off the gloves and wades into the fray, because it synthesizes the anti-Bush argument like no other work before it, and because it forces you to decide for yourself exactly where passion starts to warp point of view.

Passion: If you come seeking theological subtlety, let alone such modern inventions as psychological depth, you'll walk away battered and empty-handed

F9/11: After the screening, a friend railed that Moore was exploiting a mother's grief. I suggested that the scene made moral sense in the context of the director's universe, that the exploitation is justified if it saves the lives of other mothers' sons.

Passion: A two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie—The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre—that thinks it's an act of faith.

David Elliott, San Diego Union Tribune:

F9/11: He spends time with a caring, patriotic woman reduced to near-ruin when her son is killed in Iraq. And shows how Iraqi mothers respond, too. Call that "demagogic," if you have an agenda in place of a conscience.

Passion: "Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons," wrote Aldous Huxley, but "(for those) claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful."

F9/11: (Moore) is an indispensable treasure, and his imperfections are part of the reason, because they mark him as real.

Passion: It's awful because everything he knows about storytelling has been swept aside by proselytizing zeal.

F9/11: Let us not forget that Dana Carvey did more than anyone in America, save Ross Perot, to drive Bush père from the White House. There are sequences in Fahrenheit 9/11 so devastatingly on target as to inspire the thought that Moore might similarly help evict the son.

Passion: Sitting through the film's garishly staged suffering, one might well ponder the millions of people—victims of crusades, inquisitions, colonial conquests, the slave trade, political terror, and genocide—who have been tortured and killed in Christ's name.

F9/11: Moore exercises admirable forbearance ... his finest artistic moment.

Passion: Gibson has exhibited a startling lack of concern for historical context.

F9/11: What both exalts the experience and grounds the picture is Moore's essentially patriotic faith that a sincere, invested argument can get a hearing in America.

Passion: The story doesn't make Gibson bigger; he makes it smaller.

F9/11: A film every citizen of voting age in America should see.

Passion: The feel-awful movie of a lifetime, a filmed bloodletting like no other on record.

F9/11: Every Independent voter should see this movie and vote for Kerry

Passion: A snuff film.

F9/11: A plea for America's deliverance ... it may not be an argument one agrees with, and it may be unbalanced and propagandistic, but it is both convincingly argued and sincerely motivated.

Passion: A work of fundamentalist pornography.

F9/11: There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary.

Passion: A movie that doesn’t say much of anything new. Been there, done that, and you know how it all comes out already.

F9/11: A magnificent piece of filmmaking.

Passion: The first spiritual splatter film.

F9/11: None of this is pretty. But it is real, in a way that we rarely get from major news outlets.

Passion: A horrifyingly violent, grisly film about state-sponsored torture and execution.

F9/11: Is the label "documentary" appropriate for thisy activist movie? Of course it is, unless you cling to some idealized notion of "objective" film.

Passion: The highly selective screenplay includes only a few of Jesus' words, spoken in occasional flashback scenes.

F9/11: Moore makes a persuasive and unrelenting case that there is another way to look at things beyond the version we've been given.

Passion: A film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.

F9/11: At a time when the film industry is turning out sugarcoated, content-free junk, Moore has given American viewers a renewed taste for raw meat.

Passion: An exercise in sadomasochistic bullying.

F9/11: Moore’s greatest contribution to the national debate is that he pulls back the veil on the bloodshed of a war that has been sanitized for the American public’s consumption.

Passion: The worst thing Gibson has done has been to allow his celebrity to eclipse the film

F9/11: Anyone watching it might be stirred in the face of the total picture presented, especially on the mess the nation was misled into in what increasingly been coming apparent as a giant, costly fiasco and a diversion from the real fight against terrorism.

Passion: Gibson has every right to any interpretation he chooses and to make the film he envisions. But the rest of us have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to complain about his narrowly focused, extremely violent, ultimately exploitative personal indulgence.

Posted by Jeff at June 27, 2004 09:03 AM

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