Ruby Rich. Winning the Palme d'Or lends an air of destiny to the choice, but the Cannes film festival was an odd place for Michael Moore, man of the people, to premiere his magnus opus. Yet Moore, heartland hero, went out of the country to France's notoriously hoity-toity event to debut the movie. A Memorial Day picnic in Detroit a fortnight later might have been more in character. No matter. Moore is nothing if not a master strategist. Winning the Palme d'Or certainly puts the frosting on the cake, while going to Cannes in the first place let him assume the mantle of an exile, as though the film could not be shown in his native land.
In France he could be received as an alternative diplomat, a deposed prince wrongfully ejected from a government now out of his hands. A fat Hamlet, minus mommy and daddy, but just as set on exposing the plot at the top. Meanwhile, acres of press coverage later, the film's lack of US distribution is presumably a matter of fine-tuning a contract geared to ever-increasing profitability, a matter that will presumably be sorted out in time for Moore's cheerfully announced dream-date opening on 4 July.
He'll get the picnic after all. And, hey, while we're at it, why not get him and his VP indicted as war criminals and profiteers too?
So I tracked the film's strategies both in terms of its cinematic chops and its electioneering rhetoric, switching my focus back and forth to check one against the other. Consider these ruminations, then, as a preliminary scorecard.
The final tally awaits November, and the future. First and foremost Moore has kept his own on-screen appearances to a relative minimum. It's a gesture of political and aesthetic maturity that lets the lights shine on a brilliantly selected cast of characters whose personal experiences and specialised knowledge build to a crescendo of accusation that is both emotionally and factually persuasive.
