HAS MICHAEL MOORE STARTED AN UNHOLY TREND of inserting personality politics into documentary filmmaking? It’s a habit that not only tends to undermine whatever argument he’s pushing (if they hate the messenger, they aren’t listening to the message) but bastardizes a genre whose tried-and-true tactics work just fine without all the oversized ego obscuring the screen, thank you very much. By going gonzo with a brand of storytelling that’s basically Bill O’Reilly for lefties, he’s opened the floodgates for hacks asking questions they’ve already answered while staring into the bathroom mirror.
Watching Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, which features its maker front and center goof-trooping all over the Middle East in search of the terrorist figurehead, further drives this point home. Making yourself part of the argument is a dangerous gambit, doubly so if you’re a Winnie the Pooh with a camera and grudge a la Moore, or a first-class geek like Spurlock just joshin’ around about large-scale violence and its root causes. Everything hinges on whether we like you or not — and, mostly, we don’t like.
The first part of Spurlock’s movie is spent clawing through his righteous mustache as he decides that, since his vegan wife is pregnant (they’re the crunchiest couple in New York) with their first child, he wants to explore the fractured state of affairs in the post-9/11 world that’ll greet the kid. Specifically, he decides to travel to a series of jihadi hotbeds (Israel, Egypt, etc.) in order to find out where Osama been hidin’, a phrase it’s entirely possible he uses during the movie (you block this stuff out after a while), such is the preciousness of his humor.
While Spurlock’s conceit is, on its face at least, kinda funny and original (action movies have taught him it only takes one man to accomplish a mission, so off he goes), especially early on when he’s undergoing anti-kidnap training and the like in preparation for his trip, you begin to get the feeling you’re not in the hands of a serious artist. Rather, you feel like you’ve stumbled onto a granola-stuffed backpacker who’s super-excited to be really doin’ it, man! Or, worse, a guy shooting a feature-length home movie to be shown to his young one when it reaches puberty.
For example, when visiting a Moroccan slum, Spurlock declares, “I can’t imagine raising my kid up in a place like this,” as if it just dawned on him that sometimes people live in shitty conditions. Is this a documentary or a field trip? It’s nice Spurlock wants to capture a ground-level view of Muslim life by interviewing regular folk, but it’s downright grating when Spurlock, camera trained on his flabbergasted face, asks a Saudi Arabian schoolmaster who just cut off an interview, “How are things supposed to change if you can’t address them?” He might as well have said, “Jeepers creepers, guys! Can’t we all get just along?”
Later, in the same country, Spurlock randomly questions burka-clad women in a mall about Osama’s whereabouts, partly as a joke but mostly because he’s a fool. Whatever liberal credentials he was trying to brandish by showing Muslims eating at home with the family — and thus that, you know, they’re people, too — he pretty much crushes underfoot when he kids the countrymen of the world’s most wanted man — in English.
By the end, we’re so damn tired and bored by Spurlock’s childlike wonder and tone-deaf funnies (“Tora Bora is the bomb!”), we don’t care whom he offends, so long as he’s not onscreen. While casting yourself as the star of a documentary, as Spurlock did with Super Size Me, can work if there’s a reason for your being there, this time around Spurlock would’ve done well to hole up in a cave like ol’ Osama.
Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
Starring and directed by Morgan Spurlock
VIA:Las Vegas CityLife
Return To A&E Writing
See Other Vegas CityLife Stories