Film Studies: Shooting from the head

There is something about Michael Moore that is as alarming as it is disarming – yet on the eve of our 9/11 anniversary he is central to American culture. I'm just back from the Telluride Film Festival where his new documentary, Bowling for Columbine, had its American premiere and was the talking point of the weekend. It's an extraordinary, rabble-rousing polemic about the quantity of guns in the United States and what that availability does to us.

It is also further proof that Mr Moore – a huge, unshaven, baby faced, shambling figure in jeans and a baseball cap, forever poking at our corrupt world and turning to the camera with "Would you believe that?" looks – is a weird mixture of ombudsman and demagogue. (Imagine a cross between the straight-talking US political commentator HL Mencken and Lonesome Rhodes, the country-singer who becomes a tyrant in Elia Kazan's film, A Face in the Crowd (1957).

Bowling for Columbine is often heavy-handed. It might crack under careful fact-checking. It is too long and repetitive. Mr Moore has yielded to a self-love closer to the roots of American tyranny than he may care to notice. Still, no American film will the subject of more debate and attention this year. It asks the questions most of the country wants to have answered. Such as: why does the US have so many guns? Are they really permitted by the Constitution? Is their number linked to the nation's violence? And if the US is such a world power, why is it so afraid of anything un-American?

Often, documentaries seem to be considered reports from the past. Mr Moore begins there – at the school shooting in Columbine, Colorado just a few years ago which left 15 dead including the two perpetrators. But his movie also has the urgency of TV news. It also makes magnificent mockery of our President (which isn't hard). Opening in the US this fall it will surely contribute to the widening dismay surrounding the imminent punishment of Iraq. Why is the US considering this? Because Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction? But we have those weapons, too – should we obliterate ourselves? And what should we use but those very same deadly weapons?

All right, maybe this column does read like an escapee from the op-ed pages. Fine, but I refuse to admit to the principle that movies can't be related to life. You have to see Bowling for Columbine, and maybe you have to agree with the basis of Mr Moore's thinking, to realise how cunning and manipulative his film is. He argues the case that instead of putting so much of our budget towards being powerful and intimidating, American resources should be spent on schools, social services and the kinds of rational enquiry that may dispel fear and insecurity. And since his debut, Roger & Me (1989), Mr Moore has become a very clever film-maker.

The best thing about this new film is that, watching it, I felt that old thrill: of a packed audience of all ages and types, unified by the experience of a movie. There was a standing ovation, and a willingness to begin complicated arguments about how our nation functions. There was also the most moving shot in Charlton Heston's career.

Moore gets to interview Heston (president of the National Rifle Association). Heston lets this monster from the mob into his sweet Beverly Hills home. He does his best to answer the nagging questions. Then he knows he is trapped by an overgrown kid who will never be satisfied. So the ancient Moses gets up and walks away. Or, rather, he totters, the victim of a chronic back condition that earns sympathy even if his beliefs about guns don't. And Moore's camera holds on Heston shuffling away to the safe gloom of his luxury home. It is a profound image of American privilege at a loss for words, yet so afraid that it must go armed and broken-backed.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'Bowling for Columbine' opens in November