Face-to-face with recent history, what should we now believe?

Face-to-face with recent history, what should we now believe?: "'Was it a dream?' asks Michael Moore in the opening moments of his new film, 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' He's talking about the last presidential election, as footage of Bush, a celebratory Gore and 'something called the Fox News Network' fills the screen. But as this documentary shuttles from the Florida voting mess to the Sept. 11 attacks to the Iraq War and its aftermath, 'Fahrenheit' expands to offer up a feverish, black-comic nightmare of the country's last four years.
In ways that even the foxily adroit Moore might not have fully envisioned, the incredulous tone of his Bush II history is uncannily suited to the American state of mind in early summer 2004. On the cusp of momentous events charged with potent forward thrust -- the effects of the transfer of power in Iraq, the upcoming Bush-Kerry election, terrorism's ominous rumble -- we're caught in a strange, retrospective time warp. Collectively, in the face of it all, we've been busily redreaming our past.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" may give Bush-haters a bitter, vicarious thrill by summing up the misdeeds of the Bush years so far. But as it scuttles back and forth in time, and shuffles from war to oil, bad hair to a blackout screen depicting the Sept. 11 attacks, it captures the sorrow, wariness and dangerous velocity of the moment.

The prolonged encomiums to Reagan and wall-to-wall Clinton fest were something to seize on, like a raft in a rushing river. Now, as "Fahrenheit 9/11" reminds us, the current plunges on."


Steven Winn
Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic