Twenty years after getting his start at the Toronto film festival with "Roger & Me," Michael Moore was back Sunday night among 1,400 cheering friends for the first public screening of "Capitalism: A Love Story," without question destined to be his most controversial film yet.
This time the documentary filmmaker's target is not a corporate titan, like General Motors' CEO Roger Smith was all those years ago, but a concept -- capitalism -- so American that it seems like the country would cease to exist without it. And so, by extension, Moore's target is us, a population that his film argues has come to confuse capitalism with democracy, which is the one thing he believes could actually save us.
It is an extremely risky gambit and Moore knows it.
"At least we'll have one good night with a bunch of socialists from Canada," Moore said as the crowd roared (the documentarian couldn't have received a warmer welcome -- even the protesters out in front of the theater were on his side).
It's probably safe to say that he won't be receiving the same kind of universal acceptance from U.S. audiences when the film opens here next Wednesday.
As good a filmmaker as Moore is, he's not bad as a stand-up comedian either. The film was screening in the city's historic Elgin Theatre in the Visa screening room. Soon after taking the stage in his now familiar trucker's hat, sports jacket and tennis shoes, he crooned sotto voce: "Welcome to the Visa screening room, Vis-aaaaah. . . . " before telling about the nervous calls he got asking if there was anything about the credit card giant in his film.
But it was, for the most part, not a night for laughs as the film opened with a '50s-style health warning -- those with heart conditions or small children, should leave immediately. Though it drew laughs, they weren't hearty because the subtext was clear, this was not going to be an easy ride.
The documentary is, in its own way, an activist love letter for a different time, one he feels passionately we should reclaim, as he intercuts his own family's home movies of vacations -- "me here on Wall Street" accompanied by a shot of an 8- or 9-year-old Moore -- or a recent walk with his now 88-year-old father to the empty lot that once was a massive spark-plug factory in Flint, Mich., where his dad worked for nearly four decades. His father, he told us, had made the trip up to Toronto and was in the audience.
