Moore or less

>> Manufacturing Dissent criticizes the most popular documentary filmmaker in history

by MATTHEW HAYS

Regardless of your politics, it must be acknowledged: Michael Moore has achieved something entirely remarkable. He’s made documentary filmmaking sexy. He’s made doc blockbusters, films that rake in hundreds of millions of dollars and rally the working people with their populist, agit prop posture. His paycheque for making Sicko is a reported $25- million. That puts him on par with the best-paid stars in Hollywood, including Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.

Obviously, the American right just hates Moore. That was John McCain, slamming Moore at the Republican convention in ’04, which led to several minutes of Moore getting booed by the crowd. As he condemned it, McCain conceded he hadn’t even seen Fahrenheit 9/11.

Thus, when right-wing cranks come along and trash him, it’s easy to dismiss them as blind lunatics. Less easy to dismiss, however, is the work of two filmmakers—one Canadian, one American, both progressive leftists—who have crystallized much of the negative rumblings about Moore into a compelling doc, Manufacturing Dissent. As a diehard Moore fan, I so wanted to dismiss their arguments as nitpicking. But after watching it, that’s much harder to do.

Michael and me

“We really liked Moore’s films too,” says co-director Debbie Melnyk. “We hate the war in Iraq and find Bush dreadful. But Moore really intrigued us as a figure, and we wanted to delve into his world and his work.” As Melnyk explains it, she and filmmaking partner Rick Caine had already done a documentary on a public figure whose politics they didn’t like, Citizen Black, about Lord Conrad. Why not do a biopic on Moore?

“Initially, we thought we were going to make a pretty standard documentary,” recalls Melnyk. “But as time went on, it became clear that Moore was not going to grant us an interview, so we started to feel like we needed to put more of our quest into the film.”

That Moore might be too busy to grant an interview is arguably not that surprising. He is a superstar, and one who’s faced death threats, so a protective stance is not a shocker. But some of what Melnyk and Caine include in Dissent is disturbing (the title, of course, is a play on the landmark doc about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent). Among the worst: Moore’s first doc, Roger & Me, is predicated on his futile efforts to land an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith. The problem? Smith granted Moore a rather lengthy interview, despite the fact that Moore made it look like they’d never spoken and that Smith was inaccessible.

True lies

Though they contend that they wanted to avoid it, Melnyk and Caine do dabble in some character assassination. Moore is denounced as egomaniacal, self-aggrandizing, boorish and opportunistic. Former co-workers contend that he was fired from Mother Jones due to incompetence, not because they didn’t like his politics. Ralph Nader, not shockingly, doesn’t like the man.

“When we were making the film, many people asked us why we were doing it,” says Melnyk. “People hate Bush so much that they don’t want to see one of his best critics dismissed or attacked.” But as she and Caine dug, she said the evidence was so compelling they felt the need to push forward.

Manufacturing Dissent has some good moments, but it suffers from the kind of lack of focus that, incidentally, some of Moore’s projects do. There are too many non-sequiturs thrown in. For example, they include an interview with David Gilmour, the Canadian author who used to host Newsworld’s On the Arts. Gilmour had interviewed Moore once, and told him that he thought Canadian Bacon sucked, and was then taken aback when Moore didn’t take a liking to him. Is this surprising? “I admit it, David Gilmour is an asshole,” Caine says. “I guess we included that because we felt that it said something about Moore’s personality.”

It’s too bad—because a number of those moments often undermine the serious bits and pieces that do add up to a bad work ethic for Moore. There are those, of course, who will maintain their defence of the man. They will argue that the larger truths he’s getting at are more important than the facts he seems to be playing rather loosely with.

“I think that’s a very bad argument,” says Caine. “As documentary filmmakers, we are supposed to be uncovering the truth. How can people trust us if we are obscuring the truth, or making things up? That, in turn, allows people on the right to dismiss us that much more easily.”

Manufacturing Dissent opens this Friday, June 22

>> Movie Listings