Bowling for Columbine (15)

The People's Champ shoots from the lip

I know quite a few Americans whose blood boils at the mention of satirist, documentarist, campaigning journalist, or whatever you want to call him, Michael Moore. Oddly enough, they're all film critics on the left. The frequent argument against Moore is that he's a self-aggrandising opportunist who has used political outrage to make himself into a highly visible institution. These days, Moore is hardly an outsider figure – since the success of his 1989 film Roger and Me, in which he berated General Motors for abandoning his home town of Flint, Michigan, he has become a prominent TV face and author of several best-sellers, most recently Stupid White Men, which lampoons corporate and White House corruption. You can see how it would rankle with committed, no-budget independent documentarists that it was clownish Moore who got to visit Cannes this year and win the Special Jury Prize, while they schlep doggedly around the docu-festival circuit. Even so, Bowling for Columbine is a bracing and timely exercise in dredging for the truth; the bottom line is that, while Moore's insights might not be as analytically rigorous, he's simply more entertaining than, say, Noam Chomsky.

Bowling for Columbine is an inquiry into America's obsession with guns, but that's not all it takes in: this is a madly voracious piece of work. The starting point is the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, whose teenage perpetrators began their day by attending bowling class. From here, Moore spreads his net wide, introducing us to people and places so bizarre, yet so chillingly mundane, that the film resembles a Ripley's Believe It or Not! of gun lust. Moore visits a bank that attracts new customers by giving a gun to anyone who opens an account: "More Bang For Your Buck," says the ad. He hangs out with the Michigan Militia, with whom Oklahoma bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols briefly trained: regular family folks, not remotely wild-eyed, they even produce their own Militia Babes calendar ("It demonstrates a little sophistication that you wouldn't normally expect from the militia," they pride themselves). And Moore meets Terry Nichols's brother James, a fuzzy-bearded tofu farmer who insists, "I use the pen, 'cause the pen is mightier than the sword", then adds in a steely rasp, "but you should always keep a sword handy." What Nichols actually keeps handy is a .44 magnum, which he puts to his head to show he means business; after all, he says, "There's wackos out there." Moore could easily have spun out two hours cataloguing comedy crazies and buffoons, like the dough-faced teenager peeved to be ranked second on a local bomb threat list; sure, he admits, he made a five-gallon drum of napalm but otherwise, as Charlie Brown would say, why's everybody always pickin' on me? Extreme as they look, nearly all these characters think of themselves as ordinary Americans simply claiming their constitutional right (constitutional obligation, some insist) to bear arms – and it don't say nowhere that arms can't mean napalm.

At times, the film seems like a genial ramble, designed to amuse rather than inform. Musing on the comparative niceness of Canada, Moore takes us on a bewildering digression, walking into Toronto homes at random to show that folks up north are trusting enough to keep their front doors open; not now there's a chance of Moore the Moose blundering in, they won't.

As a polemicist, Moore is slapdash, happy to throw in whatever comes to hand with little regard for form or coherence. His proclivity for comedy montages yoked to ironic music can fall horribly flat: a catalogue of the iniquities of US foreign policy is accompanied by "It's a Wonderful World", which is plain clumsy. Moore's use of comedy archive footage is a facile, second-hand technique that had its great moment in the Eighties with Atomic Cafe and other archive satires of the Eisenhower years. The lamest section here is an animated history of American paranoia, done as an ugly knock-off of the South Park style. Moore's all-inclusiveness is, however, remarkably generous: it's brave to feature a routine by stand-up Chris Rock which is funnier and pithier than anything Moore himself has to offer.

The fast-and-furious mosaic approach also means that Moore shows a lot of his subjects' comments out of context and more or less tells us what to think of them: he makes sure we always know when we're looking at sensible people, to whom he nods attentively, as opposed to clueless goons, the camera always recording Moore's mock incredulity. He also has a habit of picking on embarrassed-looking PR people, behind whom the real boardroom villains are hiding. You could ask why he doesn't directly beard Bush or Rumsfeld, but then they're even more likely than the corporate CEOs to be "out of the office all week" as the hapless PR flaks invariably put it.

One villain he does confront directly is God's own tablet-bearer Charlton Heston, figurehead of the National Rifle Association. The NRA insisted on holding rallies in Littleton shortly after Columbine, then in Flint shortly after a six-year-old girl, Kayla Rolland, was shot dead by a six-year-old boy. There's nothing in the film quite as blood-curdling as Heston's gun-rights cry from the podium as he holds a rifle aloft: "From my cold dead hands!" When Moore visits him at home, Heston first seems amiably bewildered, then complacent ("We have a history of violence," he asserts almost proudly), then righteously horrified ("You want me to apologise to the people of Flint?"). He gets up and hobbles away when Moore produces a photo of Kayla Rolland. Moore then spoils a telling moment with a horrifically crass gesture: laying the photo against the wall, he lets his own cameraman film him as he shambles off, baseball-capped head bowed, like American Atlas shouldering the woes of his nation. Moore's Achilles heel is this awful self-aggrandising streak, his flaunting of plain-guy compassion: for the same reason, we cringe when he solicitously hugs a schoolteacher at Kayla Rolland's school.

At bottom, the film's big insight, however vague and woolly the analysis, is into a culture massively invested, ideologically and financially, in keeping its people in a state of permanent fear – whether it's of Marilyn Manson (who makes an engagingly matter-of-fact interviewee), its own schoolchildren, or the African-American population. There's far too much in the film to add up coherently – Bowling for Columbine may not be designed to make us think analytically, but Moore's punchdrunk ebullience is provocative, refreshing and necessary. He's more a rambling storyteller than a logician, with everything from punitive welfare schemes to Dick Clark's all-American nostalgia diners adding up to an omnivorous shaggy-dog story. Its punchline is another three shot dead in Columbine, and guess who this time? Bowling alley attendants.

The People's Champ image, the common-sense working-stiff pose, has its polemical purpose, of course: more people will see this film and get the message than if it were presented by some slick alt.culture New York wit. Bowling for Columbine is a big confused hectoring righteous mess, but it'll make you laugh a lot and chill your marrow even more. Rather Moore's big sweaty paw than Heston's cold dead hands any day.

j.romney@independent.co.uk