Will liberals and Moore fans like his new movie? Absolutely. Will conservatives and Moore haters detest it? Absolutely. Will it change anyone’s mind as to the character of President George W. Bush and his administration? I tend to doubt it. If you are open to its arguments, Fahrenheit 9/11 is incendiary. If you don’t buy what Moore’s selling, you probably won’t go to see it in the first place, but even if you did, you would likely sit, arms crossed, harumphing for 112 minutes.

The film’s connect the dots tale of the Bush presidency falls in two major acts. In the first (after a prologue about the 2000 election), Moore links President Bush, his father, and their friends, with Saudi royalty and the Bin Laden family. In the second, Moore’s camera heads to Iraq where he documents the country’s increasing unrest, displaying the gruesome violence and bloodshed on both sides of the war, and the heavy price Operation Iraqi Freedom has on our troops abroad and their families here at home. The two sections don’t necessarily connect, stylistically or logically, beyond President Bush’s perceived failures in both situations. Moore’s purpose is clear but his ultimate conclusion is not; in this way, it almost makes sense after seeing it that one critic could call Fahrenheit “an unfocused mess” and another could say it is “the most focused work of the director’s career.”

The material on the Bushes and the Saudis is a quickly edited assault on our administration, narrated by a mostly off-camera Moore in a quieter, more solemn voice than in his previous films. He still piles on the visual/audio contrast jokes that he’s been deploying to hilarious effect since Roger & Me; in Fahrenheit 9/11 “We Gotta Get Out of The Place” blasts on the soundtrack as the Bin Ladens are whisked out of the country in the days after September 11th. I didn’t hear a whole lot here I hadn’t heard before, nor did I get the sense that Bush or his cronies had done anything so flagrantly illegal that we should storm the White House with pitchforks and torches. It’s pretty clear though that many of these people are guilty some less than moral business choice, and their greed and personal loyalty in some cases is overpowering their sense of national duty. The connections between Bush and the Saudis don’t produce a smoking gun but they do stir up some unsavory connections, like those with James R. Bath, who served with Bush in the Air National Guard, and who also failed his medical examination like Bush, and who served as a money manager to the Binladens, and invested their money in some of Bush’s oil companies. I liked Moore's technique of showing Bush, Cheney and others, in the moments just before they are to go on the air to deliver a speech. They work as Moore's metaphoric equivalent of The PATRIOT Act: invading their privacy when they don't think anyone is looking.

When the film moves to Iraq, Moore’s presence, already relatively minimal, practically vanishes, as Fahrenheit turns into a photo essay of the stuff we aren’t seeing on the news, including gut-wrenching images of real violence visited on real people. These images bring home the high cost of this war on both sides in the way the coverage on places like CNN do not. One woman who has lost her home to American bombs cries out to God for help and for vengeance against those who have committed these acts against her. You are initially chilled by her anger, then upset when you realize your own culpability in the events, then almost sympathetic when you compare her reaction to those felt by people in this country after 9/11.

We get to hear from some of the soldiers who are serving bravely in Iraq. Their comments are often heartbreaking. They are clearly doing what they think is right, yet they are constantly confronted by a nation who despises their presence. They wonder where the hostility is coming from when they are truly there with the best of intentions. One of Moore’s most powerful points comes from these scenes; when he notes how the underprivileged, those who have gotten the least out of our American way of life, are those who are always the first called upon to lay down their lives to defend it.

Moore is out there all right, and in some cases I think he’s probably working in a lose-lose situation. Consider the powerful story of Lila Lipscomb, a hardworking woman and mother from Flint, Michigan, who advocated the military to her children for many years as a means of providing the higher education and worldly experiences she cannot. After her son is killed serving in Iraq, after writing her a final letter filled with confused, angry, antiwar sentiments, she finds her strongly held beliefs destroyed. In a very powerful scene, she goes to the White House and pours out her emotions in front of the camera, keeling over with grief. The camera moves down to keep her in frame and continues to roll. Moore is nowhere to be seen. Is he exploiting this woman’s grief? Is he giving her an outlet? Different people would say different things; and in a different movie Moore may have walked from behind the camera to comfort the woman (as he did in a similar situation in Bowling For Columbine), but that act could also be seen as shameless exploitation.