Bowling for Columbine

Bowling for Columbine is as excellent as any film about America's gun problem. It cannot be denied, and rarely is, that the problem is a serious one, as any problem is when unnecessary loss of human life is concerned. Films about serious issues like this should make you go home and think about the state of the world.

In many ways, the film is better than most on its topic. Michael Moore's style is racy and appealing. The people he interviews really do provide cause for concern. They're not so much trigger-happy as gun-obsessed, so they seem ever so slightly unbalanced, with a glint of danger in their eyes – certainly not the sort of people you'd want to be alone with. Moore is sarcastic and funny, and manages to get some real gems out of them, and at many times the audience finds themselves laughing at something that would only be funny if it weren't true.

In examining specific incidences of gun violence, Moore's style is chilling and correctly painful to endure. We see people being shot, we see gritty camera footage of a school under attack from a group of its pupils, and we hear the phone call made to the police to correspond with this action. The narrative likewise corresponds well with his selection of images, mixing comedy with tragedy for a very dark impression. It's difficult to feel the sorrow without feeling the full-on despair that the situation requires. How can a 'civilised' country end up like this? And why?

Moore doesn't make the mistake of demonising members of the public. He opts instead to make them look stupid and/or ridiculous. While some of them seem serious about wanting to protect their homes, and can't see a better way of doing so than keeping a gun at close hand, others appear to relish at the prospect, as if owning a gun is a way of life rather than a way of protecting life. Moore's demons are people of influence, who can be seen as dictating the culture to the masses, or at least encouraging it. Supermarket chains, political figures (Bush and Clinton), bank managers, and Charlton Heston epitomise the spirit of what he chooses to undermine: success and authority.

But films about serious issues like this should also treat the subject matter seriously and objectively. This is Bowling for Columbine's downfall. It is not a rigorous and well-researched documentary. It is infused with a prejudice shared by much of its audience and it strives to feed that prejudice with as many dirty tricks as possible.

Finger-pointing is the dirtiest trick pulled. A professional documentary should take a long analytical glance at nature of the problem, the source of the problem, and any potential solutions to the problem. Moore points his finger cleanly at a demographic of white right-wing American males, and builds an argument solely for the purpose of making them look like bad people. Many of them are, of course, but the techniques he uses to isolate this social group can only be described as selective.

His dismissal of urban black gang violence, for example, is a nonchalant one. We see him on a couple of street corners in LA gangland for a couple of minutes, sure, during which he takes an opportunity to mock an on-duty white male police officer, distracting him with irrelevant questions about the levels of pollution in LA. If this social group is to be ridiculed, why is it that Moore uses another white male police officer as his only claim that white violence is more serious than black? And how many people did he have to interview before he found one that said what he wanted him to say? At no point does Moore ask a black person questions about guns in urban black communities. There is no investigation into this area. Where are the statistics, Moore?

The statistics that Moore does give us are left unanalysed. Take, for example, the history of American military intervention sequence, accompanied oh-so-ironically by It's A Wonderful World. We see Americans killing and other people dying, and shocking death-counts at the foot of the screen. Nothing, of course, about why America sent troops in any of these instances – just some hate-inducing music video propaganda to keep angry students feeling self-righteous. Genius manipulative filmmaking, sure, but not so heavy on documentary research. This leaves the easily impressionable firmly on Moore's side, hungry for more crude generalisations. And that's exactly what they get. That a cartoon sequence finds its way into a supposedly serious documentary is worrying, but using cartoon humour as his only illustratation of hundreds of years of American history does not allow Moore to be described as thorough or even reasonable.

However, this is the way that Moore locates the source of the problem. He doesn't so much as say this, he just collects whatever material he can that points in this direction. He allows all this to direct him to the door of movie star Charlton Heston. Although Heston is a NRA gun enthusiast and an insensitive prick, and certainly deserved a rude awakening, I'm not so sure that it's right to intrude on an elderly Altzeimers victim in their home and proceed to film their response to something they don't appear to know anything about, and then force a picture of a little girl upon them as if they are supposed to accept responsibility for school killings.

Moore's sensitivity is another cause for concern. Perhaps it is genuine that he tries to comfort the people he wants to befriend, but an ounce of modesty would cut the scenes depicting him as a cuddly teddy-bear. The film is not lacking in emotional heartstring-tuggers. If he really cared, perhaps Moore would have made a real documentary and suggested a way out for America. But Moore offers neither answers nor solutions. There's nothing wrong with being a dreamer, but Moore seems all too keen to dwell in negativity, while coming across as a good person. He's intelligent, but he's dishonest.

So is his film. In fact, it isn't a documentary at all. In the aftermath of the film's success, it transpired that many of the scenes were deliberately staged to support Moore's lies. The opening scene, where Moore exposes a bank offering a free gun with every newly opened bank account, is faked: no such deal exists. The scene where Moore exposes the Lockheed Martin factory's 'weapons of mass destruction' that possibly influenced the Columbine killings is also false: the factory makes weather satellites, not weaponry. These are 'scenes'. There are web sites dedicated to exposing Moore's dishonesty. He is a performer who lies to entertain the gullible masses. Their hatred, in turn, inspires them to maintain his prima donna lifestyle. Somewhere along the line, the all-important anti-gun argument is adulterated.