The documentary is a genre that I largely ignored for several years, either due to the folly of my youth or my lack of interest in someone showing me what I thought was basically home movies featuring people I barely knew very discussing topics I had little or no interest in. Thanks largely to the advent of the Laserdisc and DVD formats that changed as some of my all-time favorite films started featuring full-length documentaries describing the filmmaking process and what goes into bringing them to life as well as increasing my appreciation of classical music with the featurettes with John Williams and his scores.
So now that I’ve been afforded the privilege to be a film critic, it has given me access to films that I might otherwise never given a chance, due to either lack of interest or accessibility, and documentaries now sit much closer to the top of my favorite genre than I ever imagined. In this area, there is no documentary filmmaker more polarizing in this day and age than Michael Moore, and 2016 film “Where To Invade Next” was a real favorite of mine, forcing us to take a look at policies other countries have had success with that somehow just weren’t translating (or even being attempted) in America. Suffice to say, the subject matter of his latest film “Fahrenheit 11/9” features quite possibly his must explosive topic in recent memory: the 2016 campaign and election of Donald J Trump to the title of President of the United States of America.
It is extremely difficult to summarize a film of this nature without letting my own personal feelings about the subject matter bleed through, but I will do my best. Taking a cold, hard, unblinking look at the election of a man that many deem unfit to run his own business interests, let alone a country whose faithful see him almost as a savior whereas his detractors see him as the devil incarnate, whatever side of the argument you sit on, either Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, right or left, this documentary is probably not going to do very much to change your mind on things. Moore has never made any bones about his political affiliation in the past, and it is just as obvious here. Let’s just say this: Trump won’t be hosting a screening of this film on the White House lawn any time in the near or distant future.
I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for walking into this film, as most people probably should at this point in Moore’s career. This film was pretty much built to shock and enrage people, from both Trump’s supporters as well as his detractors, but forces us to take a closer look at the political/election process and scrutinize all the flaws that are present within it. It’s not the feel-good movie of the year, but it’s an incredibly important wake-up call to the status quo that are perfectly content to leave things as they are and expecting things to get any better. Change has to start somewhere, and hopefully “Fahrenheit 11/9” will help lead to some of those changes.