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Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in our neck of the woods this weekend, so my wife and I went to see it.

Frankly, I’m surprised at all the controversy surrounding this film. It is a typical piece of Moore’s work, essentially the same brand of gonzo-style journalism that he’s been doing since Roger & Me. Personally, I don’t much care for that kind of thing, but I guess the box office figures for this film show that it has its place.

I find it kind of pathetic, really, that Moore drives around the capitol in an ice cream truck reading parts of the Patriot Act over a loudspeaker ("because the members of Congress obviously didn’t read it themselves") or ambushes Congressmen on the sidewalk to ask if they would like to enlist their children to serve in Iraq ("because only one member of Congress has a child in the Armed Forces"). There are ways to make a serious political point, and there are ways to corner someone on tape to get a good gag for your movie. I can’t help but feel that Moore too often chooses the latter when the message he is trying to get across would be better served by the former.

Where the real value of Moore’s film lies, however, is in getting the attention of everyday people, who are often simply ignorant of many of the issues that Moore shines a bright spotlight on in Fahrenheit 9/11. I would venture that the vast majority of the public simply doesn’t have a taste for politics on anything but a superficial level, which is where most people form their opinions about politicians (which is great for Bush, whose strengths lie primarily in his carefully constructed image as a man of character). By revealing some of these truths about Bush, Moore does his part to cure the ignorance of everyday people.

At work this afternoon, for example, I had a lunchtime conversation with an American colleague who mentioned that he had seen the movie and was “shocked and disturbed” by what he had discovered by watching the film. (None of which is at all new to anyone who has been following the political regions of the blogosphere for the past couple years, by the way.) He simply hadn’t given any thought to these issues before—and certainly hadn’t heard much of them in the SCLM. Thanks in part to Moore’s film, we were able to continue with a serious discussion about these issues, one not packaged in Moore’s signature shtick. That alone made the film worthwhile, I think.

Fahrenheit 9/11 may not be worthy of a standing ovation, but it’s worth seeing—even if only because it’s one of the few examples of post-9/11 popular culture that is not a total, stage-managed valentine to the president.