Tale of 2 Movies: Farenheit 9/11 and The Passion

In the last year two movies have been introduced to huge controversy: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. "The Passion" was a movie version of Christ’s last day as written in the Gospel of John, chapters 18 and 19. Gibson’s depiction is a fair rendition of Christ’s arrest, trial, torture and death. Yet, partly because of its depiction of Christ’s scourging at the hands of the Romans and its depiction of the role that Jewish leaders played in his death, the movie was roundly denounced.


Enter Michael Moore. He creates a blatant propaganda film whose ties to reality are non-existent. He provokes controversy because he attacks a sitting president and uses the cinematic art to lie like no one since Leni Riefenstahl in “The Triumph of the Will” (“Triumph des Willens”) a masterful 1934 Nazi propaganda film.

So we have two movies, one a fairly close translation of John 18 and 19, the other a piece of propaganda. How do film critics greet the two?

Here’s a compendium of side-by-side reviews, with a hat tip to BeautifulAtrocities

Keep in mind when you read them that one of the critics that praises Moore’s film characterizes it this way:

You are with Moore, or you are a war criminal. The film is part prosecutorial brief and part (as A.O. Scott has noted) rabid editorial cartoon: a blend of insight, outrage, and sniggering innuendo, the whole package threaded (and tied in a bow) with cheap shots, some of them voiced by Moore, some created in the editing room by intercutting stilted images from old movies. Moore is largely off-screen (no pun intended), but as narrator he's always there, sneering and tsk-tsking.

A.O. Scott, New York Times:

F9/11: Mr. Moore's populist instincts have never been sharper...he is a credit to the republic.

Passion: Gibson has exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end.

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune:

F9/11: Received both the first prize and the longest continuous standing ovation in the history of the Cannes Film Festival and it wasn't because of some cliched French antipathy to America.

Passion: Lacks artistic and even spiritual balance.

William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

F9/11: A masterful job of ridiculing the personality, intellect and employment resumé of George W. Bush ... could well become the docu-equivalent of "The Passion of the Christ" and even affect the presidential election.

Passion: Despite Gibson's claim that he's finally telling "the true story," his movie strikes me as less faithful to the Gospels than the earlier Christ movies. Crammed full of scenes and dialogue and minor characters that he's completely made up.

Jami Bernard, NY Daily News:

F9/11: I was in tears after first seeing "Fahrenheit" at Cannes.

Passion: The most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II.

Ty Burr, Boston Globe

F9/11: Should be seen because it takes off the gloves and wades into the fray, because it synthesizes the anti-Bush argument like no other work before it, and because it forces you to decide for yourself exactly where passion starts to warp point of view.

Passion: If you come seeking theological subtlety, let alone such modern inventions as psychological depth, you'll walk away battered and empty-handed

David Edelstein, Slate:

F9/11: After the screening, a friend railed that Moore was exploiting a mother's grief. I suggested that the scene made moral sense in the context of the director's universe, that the exploitation is justified if it saves the lives of other mothers' sons.

Passion: A two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie—The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre—that thinks it's an act of faith.


David Elliott, San Diego Union Tribune:

F9/11: He spends time with a caring, patriotic woman reduced to near-ruin when her son is killed in Iraq. And shows how Iraqi mothers respond, too. Call that "demagogic," if you have an agenda in place of a conscience.

Passion: "Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons," wrote Aldous Huxley, but "(for those) claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful."

Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle:

F9/11: (Moore) is an indispensable treasure, and his imperfections are part of the reason, because they mark him as real.

Passion: It's awful because everything he knows about storytelling has been swept aside by proselytizing zeal.

J.Hoberman, Village Voice:

F9/11: Let us not forget that Dana Carvey did more than anyone in America, save Ross Perot, to drive Bush père from the White House. There are sequences in Fahrenheit 9/11 so devastatingly on target as to inspire the thought that Moore might similarly help evict the son.

Passion: Sitting through the film's garishly staged suffering, one might well ponder the millions of people—victims of crusades, inquisitions, colonial conquests, the slave trade, political terror, and genocide—who have been tortured and killed in Christ's name.

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post:

F9/11: Moore exercises admirable forbearance ... his finest artistic moment.

Passion: Gibson has exhibited a startling lack of concern for historical context.

Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle:

F9/11: What both exalts the experience and grounds the picture is Moore's essentially patriotic faith that a sincere, invested argument can get a hearing in America.

Passion: The story doesn't make Gibson bigger; he makes it smaller.

Tom Long, Detroit News:

F9/11: A film every citizen of voting age in America should see.

Passion: The feel-awful movie of a lifetime, a filmed bloodletting like no other on record.

Eric Lurio, Greenwich Village Gazette:

F9/11: Every Independent voter should see this movie and vote for Kerry

Passion: A snuff film.

Geoff Pevre, Toronto Star:

F9/11: A plea for America's deliverance ... it may not be an argument one agrees with, and it may be unbalanced and propagandistic, but it is both convincingly argued and sincerely motivated.

Passion: A work of fundamentalist pornography.

Rex Reed, New York Observer:

F9/11: There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary.

Passion: A movie that doesn’t say much of anything new. Been there, done that, and you know how it all comes out already.

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer:

F9/11: A magnificent piece of filmmaking.

Passion: The first spiritual splatter film.

James Rocchi, Netflix:

F9/11: None of this is pretty. But it is real, in a way that we rarely get from major news outlets.

Passion: A horrifyingly violent, grisly film about state-sponsored torture and execution.

David Sterrit, Christian Science Monitor:

F9/11: Is the label "documentary" appropriate for this openly activist movie? Of course it is, unless you cling to some idealized notion of "objective" film.

Passion: The highly selective screenplay includes only a few of Jesus' words, spoken in occasional flashback scenes.

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times:

F9/11: Moore makes a persuasive and unrelenting case that there is another way to look at things beyond the version we've been given.

Passion: A film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.

James Verniere, Boston Herald:

F9/11: At a time when the film industry is turning out sugarcoated, content-free junk, Moore has given American viewers a renewed taste for raw meat.

Passion: An exercise in sadomasochistic bullying.

Jeffrey Westhoff, Northwest Herald:

F9/11: Moore’s greatest contribution to the national debate is that he pulls back the veil on the bloodshed of a war that has been sanitized for the American public’s consumption.

Passion: The worst thing Gibson has done has been to allow his celebrity to eclipse the film

William Wolf, Wolf Entertainment:

F9/11: Anyone watching it might be stirred in the face of the total picture presented, especially on the mess the nation was misled into in what increasingly been coming apparent as a giant, costly fiasco and a diversion from the real fight against terrorism.

Passion: Gibson has every right to any interpretation he chooses and to make the film he envisions. But the rest of us have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to complain about his narrowly focused, extremely violent, ultimately exploitative personal indulgence.