The Trials of Henry Kissinger and Bowling for Columbine

Left-wing documentaries are popular in New York City these days. I've been to two this week: The Trials of Henry Kissinger on Thursday afternoon, and Bowling for Columbine on Sunday night. Both showings were almost sold out, and the latter film managed to gross over $200,000 in just eight theatres over the weekend: that's over three times as much, on a per-theatre basis, than any of the top Hollywood films.

It's fashionable to sneeer at Michael Moore, the Man Who Would Be Schlub who's actually an Upper East Side millionaire. But at the same time, as my friend Kieran once said of the Guardian's Matthew Norman, I think he's some kind of genius. The same can, unfortunately, not be said of Eugene Jarecki, the director of the Kissinger film.

I would highly recommend that anybody interested in Kissinger read either Christopher Hitchens' two original articles for Harper's magazine, or else the book they were turned into. The idea behind the project was not to simply rehash the same old stories about US agression that we've all heard a hundred times from Chomsky, Sontag and the lefty-peacenik-crunchy-granola crowd. Rather, Hitchens had the genius idea to take the public evidence which is currently available, and turn it into a prosecutor's brief. With forensics always uppermost in his mind, he builds a very strong case that Henry Kissinger can and should be prosecuted under international law for crimes against humanity: others have been sentenced to long jail sentences or even death for much lesser crimes.

Film, however, is not a medium naturally suited to jurisprudence or the following of paper trails. It's also especially ill-suited to the slow and painstaking way in which Hitchens shows Kissinger to be situated at the top of a pyramid which controlled all aspects of US national security, from the armed forces to the CIA.

So although the film starts off by talking about Hitchens' war-criminal thesis, in fact it never even so much as bothers to say which crimes, specifically, he's guilty of. Rather, we're given a shallow history of US involvement in Indochina, East Timor, and Chile, with an emphasis on the way in which Kissinger personally bears responsibility for countless deaths in each one.

The film is also very confused about whether it's meant to be a crusading piece of passionate partisan rhetoric, or whether it would rather be an objective judge of Hitchens' accusations. It makes noises towards the latter at its start, but there's no evidence at all that a genuinely critical eye was ever brought to bear on what Hitchens has to say. All we get in the film is Kissinger's former lieutenant Alexander Haig doing his best impression of a lunatic reds-under-the-beds type, admitting he hasn't even read the book under discussion, and calling Hitchens a "sewer pipe sucker". All most entertaining, but hardly edifying. Surely Jarecki could have found an academic somewhere who could at least attempt to place Kissinger's actions in their Cold War context.

Michael Moore, on the other hand, in Bowling for Columbine, has complete freedom to do whatever he wants, since he never even bothers with a pretense of objectivity. Sometimes he goes too far, as when he attempts to draw some kind of connection between domestic gun violence in the US, Kissinger's misadventures in Indochina (ITMA), and Osama Bin Laden's attacks on September 11. Moore also seems to have no sense of restraint or control. This can be a good thing, as when he badgers Terry Nichols' gun-nut brother James to the point where he finally admits that maybe civilians shouldn't be allowed weapons-grade plutonium on the grounds that "there are some wackos out there"; but it also means extremely graphic footage of people getting shot or the second plane flying into the World Trade Center which I, for one, could certainly have done without. (The footage was so graphic that it made it very difficult to concentrate on what was going on in the film for the next few minutes.)

What Moore lacks in understatement he more than makes up for in filmmaking ability: he keeps the movie galloping along, even when he himself has no idea where it's going. The film starts off seemingly about white kids with guns, but moves on to the broader culture of violence in the USA, gets sidetracked by tying that in to racism (via a clip from South Park) and the relationship between white suburbs and the black inner city, then decides that it's not guns which kill people, it's fear which kills people, before finally ending on a point of some confusion in the wake of an interview with Charlton Heston.

Along the way, Moore manages, with the help of a couple of kids who got shot at Columbine, to persuade Kmart to stop selling ammunition for handguns. It's a major victory, and even he is shocked that he actually managed to make something happen: when the flack from the company announces the new policy, he can barely believe what he's hearing.

Moore also scores what must be one of the biggest coups of his television interviewing career: talking to Charlton Heston in his Beverley Hills pool house, he gets Moses to blame the number of gun deaths in the USA on this country's "multiethnic" nature. It's a shocking moment: the whole cinema as one took a sharp intake of breath and turned to the person sitting next to them with a "did he really say what I think he just said?" look.

Of course, Moore also takes gratuitous potshots at George W Bush, which got the cinema hooting with laughter, as when he replays one of those press conferences where the President warns of a grave but utterly unknowable danger, and blames "evildoers" for the heinous acts which haven't actually happened yet.

It's at times like these that Moore is at his best: while Roger and Me had enough narrative drive to structure a feature-length documentary, Bowling for Columbine feels more like a concatenation of TV-sized bites.

To his credit, however, Moore does leave us with more questions than answers, and even shows two sides of himself: on the one hand the New York liberal we all know only too well, but on the other hand the lifelong member of the NRA who really believes that it's possible to have widespread gun ownership alongside nugatory gun violence. (Moore spends a lot of time developing this thread in Canada, to no obvious punchline.)

So don't see The Trials of Henry Kissinger, read the book instead. And do see Bowling for Columbine: you'll have a great time, and get to meet some very interesting Americans in the process.

Posted by Felix at 2:30 EST