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Bowling For Columbine

By John Anderson | STAFF WRITER

October 11, 2002

(R) The muckraking Michael Moore connects the dots between America's gun obsession, media-fed racist paranoia and national murder rate, in a way that's sad, hilarious, sometimes reckless, but ought to be a wake-up call. If only Moore were less ... With Charlton Heston, George W. Bush, Salvador Allende. Written and directed by Michael Moore. 2:00. (language). At the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Broadway at 63rd Street; the 19th Street East, Broadway and 19th Street; and the Sunshine Cinemas, East Houston and Second Avenue, Manhattan.

To call Michael Moore his own worst enemy is beside the point. Yes, "Bowling for Columbine," a Moore-ish journey through the psyche of gun-loving America, contains many of the same flippant, lazy, cheap- shot-taking techniques Moore has made his stock-in-trade. He congratulates himself before giving anyone else a chance. He helps people look dangerous and stupid who hardly need his help.

But in a culture that has been sold a bill of goods about its media being liberal-controlled, its democracy being under siege by "envious" forces and its actions in the world ever just but merciful, he gets at vital issues the way no one else seems able to. More importantly, he isn't preaching to the converted. Quite the contrary.

You might accuse Moore of using the camera like a blunt object - making fun of the intellectually feeble, or the politically blinkered or the willfully undereducated; of juxtaposing objects and angles for obvious laughs; of "exploiting" Charlton Heston - who, in the film's climactic interview, shows himself pathetically unable to perform as NRA mouthpiece without a script in his hand. But it's not as if Moore's tactics had no purpose.

While he shows enough righteous indignation in "Columbine" for 10 righteously indignant movies, he also knows you don't win people over by making them defensive. You win them by separating them from the positions you hate. It's like the Mel Brooks view of Nazis - the way to make them impotent is to make them funny. So when Moore interviews the wild-eyed brother of Oklahoma bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, he lets the man shoot himself in the foot. When Moore interviews camouflaged members of the Michigan Militia, he reveals a group of heavily armed couch potatoes. When he visits a bank that offers a new rifle with every new account, he is of course ridiculing people who are only doing their job.

"Bowling for Columbine" (thus titled because Littleton, Colo., killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold reportedly went to bowling class before their slaughter at Columbine High School) should be shown in classrooms - maybe not filmmaking classrooms, because Moore is sui generis and hardly a model for totally responsible filmmaking. (The most eloquent segment in the movie is, in fact, a non- narrated catalog of U.S. foreign policy war crimes - that, and rocker/scapegoat Marilyn Manson's answer when Moore asks him what he would have said to Harris and Klebold: "Nothing. I would have listened, because no one else did.") "Columbine" would, however, be of use anywhere it would be news that an alternate history of America exists, and is being enacted as we speak.