Now Michael Moore is less

For almost 30 years, filmmaker Michael Moore has been the leading light of the Left. Now even they wish he’d just go away.

Filmmaker Michael Moore makes his broadway debut in The Terms of My Surrender. Picture: Getty Images

I have a dear New Yorker friend who as a teenager decided she had to campaign on behalf of John Kerry. She took herself off to the nearest place she could think of to sign up voters: outside a busy cinema in Manhattan where Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was showing. After a few hours she delightedly told her ­father how many people she had registered to help Kerry defeat George W. Bush. He had to gently explain to her the phrase “taking coals to Newcastle”.

Because, of course, for almost 30 years now Michael Moore has been the leading light of left-wing politics.

His 1989 debut, Roger and Me, was a groundbreaking expose of corporate America. Bowling for Columbine, his excoriation of US gun culture, won the Oscar for best documentary in 2003. Fahrenheit 9/11, his 2004 attack on the Bush administration in the light of September 11 and the Iraq war, remains the highest grossing documentary of all time.

But now, even people who agree with his politics rather wish he’d go away.

His new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, takes its name from the early hours of November 9, when Donald Trump’s victory was confirmed, and ­meanders through the wastelands of modern America — taking in the water crisis in his home town of Flint, Michigan, American indifference to a plague of mass shootings, and Barack Obama’s false hope.

It premiered with much hype at the Toronto Film Festival last month, and is now out in Australia.

Ahead of the film’s release, Moore warned that his criticism of Trump might bring about the downfall of the President, and said he was making plans to flee to Canada. “I want us to survive this, but I can’t make any guarantees that that’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “We’re in a bad place. We’re on the precipice of some very awful stuff.”

Michael Moore poses during a photocall for the film "Fahrenheit 11/9" on October 20.

But the film has bombed in America. Three weeks after it opened in the US, only a handful of New York City cinemas are showing it, and only at 11am on a weekday. Its opening weekend saw the film take a little over $US3 million ($4.2m) in 1719 cinemas. That comes to about 200 people a cinema, or roughly 350,000 ticket buyers. If my friend went canvassing now, she’d have even less of an impact.

It’s partly that he is no longer a lone voice of criticism, generating debate and causing conversation. Moore’s opening line in the film — “How the f..k did this happen?” — is now heard almost nightly on cable news. British comedian John Oliver skewers the current politics to perfection on late night television, in routines that are widely shared online. News has become comedy, tragedy and farce all rolled into one, and audiences are exhausted.

Perhaps a 64-year-old white guy who bumbles about, playing to his base with predictable propaganda, is the wrong man to deliver the killer blow? His previously charming everyman persona — baseball cap, baggy clothes and all — is also more than a little questionable, given that he is now worth an estimated $US50m and once owned nine houses.

Yes, he used his first significant pay cheque — for Roger and Me — to set up a foundation that funds first-time filmmakers, battered-women’s shelters, and soup kitchens, among other things. But a brutal New Yorker profile in 2004 accused him of browbeating unionised workers on the television show TV Nation, and of being a bad boss during a short stint at the magazine Mother Jones. Indeed, the working-class hero celebrated the release of his 2009 film, Capitalism: A Love Story, with an absurdly lavish party at a penthouse in Soho, Manhattan.

And he is now being accused of “stiffing” the “decent, hardworking” technicians who help run his film festival in Traverse City, Michigan. In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, veteran projectionist Chapin Cutler claimed Moore owed his company, Boston Light & Sound, more than $US150,000 in unpaid fees.

Perhaps Moore himself is tired. One review of Fahrenheit 11/9 — written by a long-time ­admirer — aptly compared him to an ageing rock star bashing out the albums, which merge into a predictable slush. It’s all wearily familiar.

Two years ago, on the eve of Trump’s election, I went to see his surprise last-minute release, Michael Moore in Trumpland. I was excited: news of his unexpected project spread on social media, and it was like a carnival had been conjured up in Manhattan’s Chelsea ­district.

Outside the cinema, the Overthrow boxing club was handing out stickers with Michelle Obama’s famous “when they go low, we go high” quote. Someone had wheeled out an arcade Trump fortune-telling booth; put in a coin, and the machine would crank into action and spout a Trumpism. Images of Trump were projected on to the building as Moore conducted nightly Q&A sessions.

At that point, of course, we all gleefully thought Hillary Clinton would win. All except Moore, who had predicted Trump’s victory in July 2016.

Yet my friend and I emerged from the screening disappointed. I had hoped to see him breaking bread with people in that engaging, Louis Theroux way — shedding some light on a sector of society genuinely mystifying for many urban Americans. But Michael Moore in Trump­land was just him standing on a stage in Ohio, begging the predominantly Republican crowd of voters to rethink. Perhaps that’s when the ­fatigue set in.

Moore went on to launch a one-man Broadway show, The Terms of My Surrender, in which he held forth on the issues of the day. Trump, looking up from Fox News, did at least react: “While not at all presidential I must point out that the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close. Sad!”

The show had played its scheduled 100 performances, and Moore tweeted: “You must have my smash hit of a Broadway show confused with your presidency — which IS a total bomb and WILL indeed close early. NOT SAD.”

But in a city rocked by the resident of Trump Tower ending up in the White House, Moore failed to make the anticipated waves. Perhaps Americans were too down to laugh at it all.

Moore didn’t help himself by refusing to adapt to the move towards streaming, and categorically ruling out launching films on services such as Netflix or Hulu. Moore also has had personal woes to contend with. As the film was launched his ex-wife Kathleen Glynn, whom he divorced in 2014 after 23 years of marriage, sued him for swindling her out of profits from their producing partnership. Moore’s lawyer said the timing was deliberate, and a “malicious” attempt to “smear” him on the day of the world premiere. Their case continues.

Moore surely knew that he was never going to replicate the success of Fahrenheit 9/11 — a film that sparked furious soul-searching across the US, and which dominated discussions. And he still has an immense following as well as incredible storytelling skill.

But we’re jaded, Michael, when perhaps we need that jolt of energy most. To paraphrase Fahrenheit 11/9 — you’ve analysed, endlessly, how on earth we got here. Now what?

Fahrenheit 11/9 is in limited national release.