Michael Moore's 'Columbine' is important, even with flaws

What gets you, while watching Michael Moore's gun documentary "Bowling for Columbine," are the tears.

A grade-school principal turns away from the camera and weeps, remembering the loss of a 6-year-old student fatally shot by a classmate.

A security consultant in Littleton, Colo., home of Columbine High School, gets choked up on mention of the 1999 massacre.

Most painful of all, accompanying grainy Columbine videotapes that look like scenes from a horrific video game, is a voice on a 911 call.

"They're firing shots in the library," says the voice, somewhere between a sob and a shout.

Moore ("Roger & Me") has made a flawed film but an important one; a documentary that occasionally borders on incoherence, but as often speaks with utter clarity.

Why, he asks, are there so many gun deaths in the United States? Is there something in our culture that makes us more violent than, say, Canadians, who have just as many guns but far fewer shooting deaths?

Moore's answer is a complex one, but boils down to something simple. We are, he says, a people consumed by fear.

It's a powerful message, and Moore pounds it home with a heartfelt urgency. Never one to keep his own opinion and personality quietly off-camera, he trudges through the film like Everyman with a camera crew, narrating in his folksy, slightly nasal voice as he travels from Colorado to Michigan to Ontario to California.

He's got an unfortunate fondness for making regular people look foolish (remember the woman who sold rabbits, in "Roger & Me"?), and it's a bit cringe-worthy here when he coyly asks an earnest law-enforcement official whether a dog can be arrested for a crime or lets a few Columbine classmates ramble on incoherently.

Elsewhere, though, he's uncannily on target. Early in the film, he enters a suburban bank branch that's advertising a free gun giveaway with new accounts. ("We are a licensed firearm dealer," says the teller, with no apparent irony.) Moore agreeably fills out a form, makes a deposit, gets his gun, and wonders aloud whether guns and banks aren't an odd combination.

And even he seems genuinely affected when another stunt — bringing several wounded Columbine students to Kmart headquarters to "return" the Kmart-purchased bullets still in their bodies — has a surprising and very positive result.

Moore gives short shrift to viewpoints other than his own here, though he does ambush a few opposing voices. NRA president Charlton Heston, interviewed at home, mumbles something alarming about the "mixed ethnicities" in the U.S. contributing to gun violence. (The film was made prior to Heston's announcement that he has Alzheimer's, but Heston seems dazed and the interview has a cruel edge.)

And his approach to the topic can only be described as scattershot — Moore careens from discussions of foreign policy to interviews with militia members to wandering onto people's front porches to see if their doors are locked, with links that are tenuous at best. Surely the case of Susan Smith, who drowned her children in her car, is borderline relevant here, as is an interview with Dick Clark, who owned the chain of restaurants that employed the mother of the boy who shot the 6-year-old. (Wisely, Clark avoids the camera.)

But despite its messiness, "Columbine" is devastating viewing. Watch it, argue about it, embrace it, denounce it — Moore's put his finger on something we all need to talk about, before only tears remain.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com.