Fahrenheit 11/9 review: Stirring Trump documentary is vintage Michael Moore

Dir: Michael Moore; Featuring: Donald Trump, Michael Moore, Timothy Snyder, Bernie Sanders. Cert TBC, 120 mins

Michael Moore’s genius as a documentary maker lies in his ability to take dense, complex material other filmmakers would tackle in a far more earnest fashion, and to present it in his folksy, entertaining style –without ever trivialising the issues under discussion.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is vintage Moore. It is ostensibly about Donald Trump’s presidency (“How the f*** did this happen?!”) but Moore’s approach is wide-ranging and discursive. The early scenes chronicling the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election are mordantly funny. Moore reveals that one of the main reasons Trump decided to run for president was because he was jealous that pop star Gwen Stefani was being paid more than he was for appearing on TV. The campaign for the White House, which Trump never thought he would win, was his strategy for boosting his profile and earning potential.

Moore accords Trump a grudging admiration for the way he “took out” all the other Republican contenders in the primaries, including Jeb Bush. The director also includes a montage sequence (funny and poignant in hindsight) of every kind of expert from every shade of opinion predicting that Trump has no chance at all of winning.

His account of the election night itself is an exercise in despairing hilarity. Hillary Clinton and her team had assembled for what was supposed to be a very lavish victory party. We see the event slowly turn into a prolonged wake. Trump wasn’t prepared for his own victory, either.

Much of the middle of the film is devoted to the horrific story of how the water was tainted in Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan. The documentary alleges that cynical, money-chasing politicians, foremost among them Governor Rick Snyder, switched the city’s water supply, thereby exposing the locals to lead poisoning.

It’s a shocking and heartbreaking story from which even President Obama comes out very badly. What isn’t immediately clear is what all this has to do with Trump. Moore’s point, one guesses, is that the voters who were treated with such contempt in places like Flint were precisely the ones who ended up voting for “the Donald”.

Other subjects the documentary touches on include the teenagers who take on the gun lobby in the wake of yet more school shootings; teachers striking in West Virginia; the sharp practice employed by the Democratic party leaders to make sure Bernie Sanders wasn’t their candidate, and the missing 100 million Americans – the non-voters who’ve allowed themselves to become disenfranchised and who could sway the course of US politics instantly just by exercising their basic democratic rights.

Of course, Moore keeps on coming back to Trump. The film concludes that the 45th president is close to fascistic – but that nobody notices the fact. Moore also consults distinguished historian Timothy Snyder, who points out how fragile and young the democratic system in the US really is.

Fahrenheit 11/9 covers so many topics that it risks losing its focus. Its tone wavers. The film includes both satirical humour and scenes and observations which cannot but induce despair. It’s easy to knock Moore and to suggest that his relevance is slipping. His new films perform markedly less well at the box office than their predecessors.

However, Fahrenheit 11/9 is a stirring, funny and angry piece of polemical filmmaking that hits the mark far more often than it misses.