Documentary is first to compete at Cannes in 46 years
By Angela Doland, Associated Press, 05/16/2002
CANNES, France —
A Michigan bank advertises a peculiar incentive gift for opening an account: a gun.
So filmmaker Michael Moore visits, asks a few questions -- "the bank is a licensed firearms dealer," a clerk tells him -- and soon walks out with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Thus starts Moore's new documentary about guns and violence in America, a movie that takes him from his home state of Michigan to Columbine High School in suburban Denver to Charlton Heston's Beverly Hills home.
"Bowling for Columbine" is Moore's fifth movie since his 1989 debut, "Roger and Me." It's also the first documentary to compete in the Cannes Film Festival's main competition in 46 years.
Moore believes America is obsessed with guns, and -- wearing his trademark baseball cap and sagging jeans -- he crossed the United States (and visited Canada) filming 200 hours of footage to find out why.
As in Moore's other films, some of the interviews are uncomfortably funny: The laughs come because people's responses are so absurd.
Other interviews are almost unbearably sad, as when Moore talks to a soccer dad wearing a photo of his son, who was killed in the 1999 Columbine massacre.
At the premiere Friday in France, Moore's film got a prolonged standing ovation. The director thanked the audience and said: "Now the real work is back in the United States, to start to correct these problems."
United Artists picked up the film on Friday for U.S. distribution.
The title "Bowling for Columbine" refers to a detail about the high-school shooting: Before they opened fire in their school, killing 13 people and then themselves, gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went bowling.
After the shooting, the media asked what had gone wrong in their lives. Was it violent movies? The music they listened to? (Harris and Klebold were fans of rocker Marilyn Manson -- who incidentally gives one of the movie's most lucid and well-spoken interviews.)
Some blamed Manson for inspiring the killings; why not blame bowling? Moore asks.
In one chilling sequence, he shows footage from Columbine's surveillance cameras and plays 911 tapes from panicked, breathless callers inside the school.
Later in the film, Moore meets two survivors of the attack, both of whom still have bullets lodged in their bodies. Together, they travel to the headquarters of Kmart, the store where the bullets were bought.
The boys pull up their shirts to show executives their scars, and soon Kmart announces that within 90 days it is pulling bullets for handguns and assault weapons from its shelves.
Columbine is a focal point of the movie, but not its only subject. Moore jumps to other tragedies, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the killing of a 6-year-old girl from Flint, Mich., who was shot by another 6-year-old who brought a gun to school.
"Bowling for Columbine" is a blast of non-stop images, including a hilarious cartoon about U.S. history that's narrated by a talking bullet.
The movie plays with many contradictions; Moore, who grew up around guns, has been a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association.
He tried for two years to get an interview with Heston, the NRA president and the actor who played Moses in "The Ten Commandments." In the end, Moore bought a map of stars' houses in California and drove to Heston's house.
"I just rang the buzzer, and out of that little box came the voice of Moses," Moore told journalists. He got his interview -- which doesn't make Heston look very good.
The film's strongest point is Moore's talent for pushing his interview subjects further and further, persuading them to tell a little bit more.
He interviews one young man who was kicked out of high school. Why? Moore asks. First, the man says he was on a list of potentially dangerous students. Then he admits he had a copy of the "Anarchist's Cookbook." Eventually, almost boastfully, he admits he once used the book to whip up a few gallons of napalm.
You get a sense he just wanted to talk to someone. And Moore was there to listen.
© Copyright 2002 Boston Globe Electronic Publishing
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