Moore hits the mark.

• Author: Thompson, Stephen

Somewhere along the way, Michael Moore added a tiny shred of subtlety to his rhetorical arsenal. A raconteur accustomed to spraying ideas and invective as if they were the same thing, Moore isn't known for pulling back the reins, but Fahrenheit 9/11 tones down his blustery act, finding room for nuance in areas ranging from September 11 footage (the planes hit the buildings, but the screen is black) to his own onscreen presence (he narrates, but is largely invisible).

With a target as meaty as George W. Bush and the key players in his Administration, Moore himself wisely sticks close to the periphery: A household name and wealthy celebrity, he's the (figurative) little guy no longer, which might have made him a distraction in a film with so much to say about the President and America's role and goals in Iraq. Stripped of the obscurity he'd need in order to wage sneak-attack interviews, he's better off staying outside the frame, assembling his case with the aid of talking beads, unreleased news footage, and empathetic small-scale studies of the individuals affected by large-scale U.S. decision-making.

Fahrenheit 9/11 cuts deepest when Moore trains his camera on Lila Lip-scomb, a working-class mother in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The filmmaker's most powerful weapon has long been his street-level populism, his understanding and appreciation of how everyday people live, work, think, and barely get by. In Lipscomb, he finds Fahrenheit 9/11's conscience, as her cheery demeanor gives way to grief and anger when her son, a scared young soldier in Iraq, dies in a helicopter crash. Her riveting interviews transcend the choose-a-side hype that has trailed the film since long before its release: Some of Moore's arguments hold more water than others, but Lipscomb's visceral reaction to tragedy illustrates the price of war even more vividly than the film's horrific footage of severed limbs and charred corpses.

Unfortunately, Fahrenheit 9/11 tries to illuminate more than just the causes and effects of military adventurism in Iraq. Much of the film's first half dwells on a conspiracy theory explicated in Moore's 2003 book Dude, Where's My Country? The claim is that Bush's close ties to the Saudi royal family (as well as to the multinational corporation run by Osama bin Laden's wealthy relatives) led U.S. officials to grant Saudi nationals special favors in the days following September 11, at the expense of Americans' safety and the search for bin...