|
Bowling
for Columbine
review by Elias Savada, 18 October 2002
Of the thirty-nine films I caught
during the recently completed San Sebastian Film Festival (twenty as
member of the New Directors Jury), the two that impressed me most
contained some of the most violent imagery, Paul Greengrass'
Bloody Sunday, a starkly draining day-in-the-damned-life
recreation of the Derry, Northern Ireland massacre of thirteen
unarmed civilians by British soldiers thirty years ago. And Michael
Moore's just as biased Bowling for Columbine, which had
already captured a special fifty-fifth Anniversary Prize as Cannes.
I happened to catch this confrontumentary at a presentation where it
was competing for the Pearl of the Audience Award, carrying a 30,000
Euro cash prize in aid towards a film's promotion. Columbine,
which already had four unreelings early in the festival, was the
second to last film of eighteen eligible entries screening in its
field, a 9:30 PM presentation to a sold-out audience on September
27th, the day before San Sebastian closed its fifty-fifth annual
outing. Among the other films that had been in strong contention:
Aki Kaurismäki's Mies Vailla
Menneisyyttä/The Man Without a Past (with a 3.373 out of a
perfect 4 score); Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise
(3.430), Bloody Sunday (3.556), Cidade de Deus
(3.569), and Roman Polanski's The Pianist (3.538). At the end
of the Columbine screening, in which I was undoubtedly one of
the few Americans in the audience, I turned to fellow juror Alberto
Elena and predicted victory. There was that much electricity in the
room. Or was it the European hatred for the USA's love affair with
guns that I was feeling?
Of course
the film won with a 3.693 score. Personally I've given it a perfect
four stars.
Watching the film again at its
first afternoon screening on the day it opened on three screens in
the Washington, DC area—a region under siege by a rifle-toting
terrorist for the last two weeks—I wondered if the nutcase who has
killed nine and wounded two innocent victims throughout the
metropolitan area might be seated in the sparse audience looking for
guidance, or salvation, from Michael Moore's latest (and greatest)
muckraking effort. The gunman thankfully wasn't waiting in the
parking lot outside the suburban Northern Virginia multiplex.
Because of the assassin's trigger-happy grip, outdoor events
throughout the vicinity have been cancelled, and residents are under
a heightened state of anxiety, enough to keep them away from movie
theaters - including the few playing this profoundly unsettling
two-hour examination of the terrifying number of Americans shot to
death every year and the epidemic of fear spreading throughout our
nation. It's hard not to think about the real-life terror going on
here in the Nation's Capital when you're at or even contemplating
going to a movie, let alone Bowling for Columbine. So, is the
coincidence of the murderer amongst us and the arrival of this
must-see movie considered a good or bad publicity tie-in. Are there
P.R. flacks out there actually confirming the adage that even bad
publicity is good? It's a disconcerting state of life imitating art
imitating life.
The situation is absurdly comic if
you start to consider the over-the-top media frenzy examining every
piece of leaked, false, or generally circumspect evidence that is
being dug up, packaged, and tossed out on us during the evening and
"special" newscasts about the killer in our midst. It's a subject
that Moore analyzes closely during his provocative piece. He wryly
observes the disheartening connection between several similar
stories (starting with the death of six-year-old Kayla Rolland by a
classmate in Flint, Michigan, Moore's home town) and within that
microcosm showcases how often-prissy and appearance-minded news
reporters frenzy on murder without examining the underlying social
factors. As for Flint and its environs, the city again bears the
brunt of a community shamed and abandoned, a condition exacerbated
by the factory pullout by General Motors that was the subject of
Roger & Me, Moore's award-winning 1989 landmark commentary and
highest-grossing narrative documentary of all time.
Moore crams a lot of disturbing
information, satirical analysis, dead-pan sarcasm, and
confrontational journalism in the 119 minutes he has our attention.
In the aftermath of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, the
director set out to examine why this or other high-profile acts of
violence (including the Oklahoma City bombing) are such an American
"tradition" and inadvertently have such close links to his own
neighborhood. The BIG facts alone—which he uses to defrock Charlton
Heston, a.k.a. Moses, in a final, surprise interview that reveals
the miscomprehension and frailty of the aging NRA celebrity
spokesman—are horrifying. In the civilized world (and outside of
warfare), the following countries count their annual deaths by
gunfire: Germany (381), France (255), Canada (165), the United
Kingdom (68), Australia (65), and Japan (39).
United States (11,127).
Moore (and his viewers) wonder if
this highly immoral number is due to the oversupply of weapons or
some basic ethnic breakdown in the good ole U.S. of A. Our neighbor
to the north, Canada, has 30 million people, 7 million guns (a ratio
similar to that in this country), yet has less than 1.5% of the
total of our gun-induced killings. And many Canadians don't keep
their doors locked, a fact that befuddles Moore and sends him
scurrying about one neighborhood apologetically proving the
statement.
As for Littleton, Colorado, home of
the Columbine tragedy, Moore shows us the grainy security-camera
footage as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold bring down some of the
twelve students, a teacher, and ultimately themselves that day in
April 1999. Moore's attempt to connect the area's largest employer
and the world's biggest weapons manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, with
the violent condition is less than satisfactory, although its sadly
coincidental that the day of the Columbine killings was also the
largest single-day barrage of American-financed bombs raining down
on Kosovo.
That last factoid is brought up a
second time in an interview Moore conducts with singer Marilyn
Manson, a keenly aware individual who believes himself wrongly
accused by many politicians as inspiration for the deadly events in
Columbine. Wherein Moore wonders if it wasn't the game of bowling
that Harris and Klebold played in the early morning hours of the
last day of their lives that could just as easily been the cause.
One of Moore's early amusing
moments showcasing the easy availability of guns, occurs when he
strolls into the North County Bank & Trust, opens a new account, and
takes home a free gift—a brand-new bolt-action rifle. After which
Moore, turning to the camera, rhetorically asks "You think it's a
little dangerous handing out guns at a bank?"
The whole undertaking is very much
an archivist's product reel filled with slices of visual kitsch and
counter-pointed commentary, inter-cut with a couple of droll South
Park animations (courtesy of co-creator Matt Stone, who grew up in
Littleton, a mountain town that was "painfully, painfully, painfully
normal") and Moore's semi-insurrectionary episodes. Only one is
ultimately (unexpectedly and wondrously) successful, in which Moore,
accompanying two Columbine survivors with seventeen-cent K-Mart
bullets embedded in their bodies, pigeonholes that retailer's
executives into removing all ammunition from the shelves of their
stores. Yet, of all the targets that come under Moore's crosshairs,
the biggest is the National Rifle Association (of which Moore is a
life member), with the sacrilegious image of Charlton "From my cold,
dead hands!" Heston unconscionably visiting Denver and Flint just
days after national attention has focused on tragedies in their
communities.
Finally, you'll be speculating
whether this whole shebang is guilty of being in poor taste. If
you're Heston or someone who honestly and shamefully believes it's
your American right to have a gun or two or ten in every house (and
Moore has shown us that there are municipalities that have passed
laws requiring them!), Bowling for Columbine will leave you
with a distinctly sour taste. Tough noogies. For the rest of us,
this disquieting, comic brand of guerrilla filmmaking is two hours
of subjective preaching that should be required viewing. |
|
