01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Documentary: A factual film depicting actual events and real people.

-- Ephraim Katz's Encyclopedia of Film

TO ME, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, an excoriation of the Bush administration, fits the definition of "documentary." Republicans and other conservatives will probably scoff at "factual" and "actual." To them, Moore's attempt to paint George W. Bush in an unflattering light is utter calumny. Liberals, meanwhile, are singing hosannas and counting on Fahrenheit 9/11 to help unseat Bush in November. (To that end, Moore plans a video release of Fahrenheit 9/11 for September.)

Conservatives hope that the whole Michael Moore business will dissipate in the national atmosphere of short attention spans. And anyway, the film will be seen only by those who already hew to Moore's politics, right? "There's only a very small percentage of Americans that are going to go and see this movie," said David Bossie, head of a conservative group called Citizens United.

Well, maybe.

Some guys in Indiana (far from the cocktail crowd in New York) held a tailgate bash outside a theater where Fahrenheit 9/11 was playing. They planned to throw a "Michael Moore house party" after seeing the picture.

As a movie event, Fahrenheit 9/11 is the real deal, the likes of which were not equaled even by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. On the first day of its national release (on fewer than 900 screens), Fahrenheit 9/11 took in $8 million. The figure had tripled by the close of the opening weekend.

Not Harry Potter, perhaps, but pretty good for a film made by "a guy . . . with a high-school education and with no training in journalism," as Moore recently described himself.

Yet though I admire his spunk and think that Fahrenheit 9/11 is his best work, I'm not sure I'd ever call Moore a journalist. A polemicist is more like it. Moore, whose oeuvre includes three features and a short-lived television series (TV Nation), is America's gadfly filmmaker. He's Jimmy Breslin with a Panaflex camera, H.L. Mencken with a sound bite, Don Quixote at an editing console. He makes the guys in the suits uneasy.

Whether it's General Motors, after reducing his hometown of Flint, Mich., to a wasteland with plant closings, (Roger & Me), Chuck Heston and his all-powerful gun lobby (Bowling for Columbine), or the U.S. president, Moore never tires of hoisting his lance and charging into battles of Arthurian proportions.

Make no mistake: Fahrenheit 9/11 is about real people -- most notably Lila Lipscomb, a self-described patriot from Flint who lost her son in the Iraq War. After reading aloud his final letter home, she doubles over in grief and cries, "I want my son back!" The audience where I saw the film sat in stunned silence. One woman left the theater in tears.

Once again, Michael Moore, the rumpled and rotund Everyman with a Camera, was in our faces. "From day one," he said in a recent interview, "my attitude was that I would not be deterred."

I found Moore's film to be laced with sardonic wit and ultimately devastating. It takes on Bush, the Bush cabinet, the Saudi royal family, Sept. 11, 2001, and the administration's dubious motives for waging war in Iraq. The president comes across as a bumbler, ill-equipped to run the country.

Slanted? Cinematically manipulative? In some instances, yes. Damning? Unquestionably.

And almost predictable, given Moore's dislike of Bush. We saw a preview of that last year when -- in accepting the 2002 Best Documentary Oscar for Bowling for Columbine -- Moore thrust a finger into the camera and scolded: "Shame on you, Mr. Bush!" Boorish, sure, but no one ever said the filmmaker was demure.

As a documentary maker, he has his own style. Some of today's other leading documentarians (Frederick Wiseman and Steve James come to mind) mostly confine their appearance in a film to voice-overs. Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi documentaries fuse Philip Glass's music to images in advancing Reggio's holistic themes; in six hours of film, there is no text, certainly no dialogue.

Not content with ivory-tower coverage, Michael Moore will get right into a picture and meet his subject head-on. In his docu-dramas, he's the Lilliputian up against the Brobdingnagians.

Conversely, we have another Oscar-winning documentarian, Errol Morris. If Michael Moore is blue-collar, Morris is the guy in loafers.

The Harvard-educated Morris won the 2003 Academy Award for The Fog of War, a probe of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Usually, though, Morris's bailiwick is eccentricity: a lion tamer, a man who builds electric chairs, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, a Florida worm farmer, the topiary gardener at Green Animals, in Middletown, R.I.

Where Moore runs ahead of a hand-held camera in pursuit of his prey, Morris lets his subjects talk before a stationary camera. The longer they talk, the more they sink or swim.

Two distinct styles: Which is preferable?

That's a matter of personal interest, of course. What is clear is that, while documentaries generally deal with events of the past, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a film with immediate impact. Of course, time alone will gauge whether that impact is lasting.

Bob Leddy, a film historian and former Journal reporter, is a frequent contributor.