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"The film asks Americans to look deeply into their souls and accept
their violent nature, as demonstrated by their love of guns." Michael Moore looks as sharp as a pistol as he clowns at yesterday's photo shoot for The Star. He has every reason to feel on top of his game. His gun-crazy new movie Bowling For Columbine is the talk of the Toronto International Film Festival, where tonight it will receive its Canadian premiere at the Elgin Theatre. In May, the film won a special jury prize at Cannes, where it was the first documentary in decades to compete for the coveted Palme d'Or. Even better, the finger-pointer from Flint, Mich., has been vindicated as America's most vocal critic of bad business practices. The man who skewered General Motors with Roger & Me (1989) and Nike with The Big One (1997) has recently seen, in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, even the U.S. president join him in demanding punishment for corporate criminals. And his latest book, Stupid White Men, has been a bestseller since its publication earlier this year. Is the champagne chilled and ready for popping? But as Moore settles his hefty frame into a hotel couch for an interview, adjusting his trademark baseball cap and glasses, the 48-year-old filmmaker suddenly becomes very serious. "Actually, I'm feeling pretty bad these days," he says. "My Mom died a few weeks ago. I wasn't expecting it. Just boom - she's gone. I wasn't going to come here, but my Dad said, 'No, c'mon, let's go.' So we drove here from Flint yesterday." Moore's inner sadness amidst the festival hoopla fits the dark mood of Bowling For Columbine. The film asks Americans to look deeply into their souls and accept their violent nature, as demonstrated by their love of guns. The citizens of the world's richest and most powerful nation, Moore argues, suffer from powerful insecurities brought on by endemic racism and xenophobia. The American response to every threat from within and without has been to praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, from the Indian-hunting days of the founding Pilgrims to George W. Bush's current plans to attack Iraq. "The film is a bitter pill for Americans because I'm saying it's not the guns per se, it's us," Moore says, urging Canadians to take heed and avoid the same fate. "We have a shared mental problem as a country: A fear that's based on racism, and we don't want to touch it. "Some liberal (film) critics, when they saw Bowling For Columbine at Cannes, accused me of fuelling anti-Americanism. I was really shocked by this blind patriotism to the U.S. It has even blinded liberals, turning them into flag-wavers." It's easy to see why some people might view the film as anti-American. Everyone in the film looks like the worst kind of gun nut. This includes the actor Charlton Heston, who played Moses in The Ten Commandments but who lately has been pimping for the National Rifle Association. It also includes Moore, who admits to being a prize-winning marksman, and still a card-carrying member of the NRA. Half journalist and half anarchist, Moore takes us down city streets and country roads to visit a bank where rifles are given to new customers, and to a weekend meeting of the Michigan Militia, where regular moms and pops find fellowship in heavy weaponry. Moore also forces us to watch the surveillance tapes of the carnage at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., where in April 1999 teens Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed 12 students and one teacher. It's the first time the tapes have been shown in public, and Moore said he easily obtained them through an access to information request that the TV networks were too fearful to pursue. "As exploitive as television usually is, no network or station played those tapes. Why is that? My only answer is that what's scary about those tapes is the normalcy of them. It looks like any bunch of suburban kids in any suburban high school and, wow, that's just too close to home. We like our monsters to look like monsters." Moore was two-thirds of the way through making Bowling For Columbine when the terrorist attacks of last Sept. 11 occurred. The event made many Americans even more fearful and even more eager to obtain arms. "If anything, Sept. 11 just confirmed what I was already saying in the film: That we have this culture of violence that we're both master and victim of. And because we're the master, we can actually alter the victim part. We can choose to be different. We can choose to treat the rest of the world differently. "We can actually make it better," Moore continues, in full rhetorical flight. "A lot of countries can't say that. We can say it. Why don't we do it?" Scratch a cynic and you'll find a disillusioned idealist. Moore sometimes comes across as a Pollyanna type who hides his shattered Utopian dreams behind a veneer of wicked satire, and his on-camera ambushes can seem facile and mean-spirited. Such as when he tracks down rock 'n' roll impresario Dick Clark and holds him to account for being the owner of a themed restaurant that employed the mother of a 6-year-old Flint child who found a pistol under his uncle's bed, and promptly shot another 6-year-old with it. Why didn't Moore go after the uncle who carelessly left the gun out, rather than Clark, who was simply the minimum wage-paying boss to the killer tot's mom? "Because we already know about the uncle," Moore says, a trifle defensively. "We all collectively know that. Film as an art should challenge you to think of the other routes. What I'm saying here is that (Clark) is 'the good German.' You can't just say, 'Oh, I didn't know about that. I just had my name on the restaurant.' I'm saying that he was a participant in this. He tried to get a tax break by employing this woman, who should have been home with her kids. He was a cog in the wheel. But we're all a part of this."
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