‘Michael Moore in Trumpland’ Review: The Showman Documentarian Skewers the Election

Tuesday night’s premiere of Michael Moore‘s “October surprise” documentary,Michael Moore in Trumpland, turned the street outside New York City’s IFC Center into a carnival fairway of sorts.

There was an automated fortune-teller booth like the narrative shaper in “Big,” but with a red-eyed Donald Trump spewing fear-raising predictions and making demeaning comments about women.

Nearby were vans that mixed political displays with games of skill, some bearing images that deserved to be knocked down with bean bags.

Before the screening, Moore told the audience he’d made the film in seven weeks and had locked it just hours before the premiere, which was decided upon a day in advance.

“Michael Moore in Trumpland” is actually the cinematic adaptation of a one-man show Moore wrote for himself and performed twice in a theater in Wilmington, Ohio, a town with an overwhelming preponderance of pro-Trumpers.

The filmed audience, which attended both shows, was selected to represent a cross section of Americans — pro-Trump and pro-Clinton voters, women, millennials, whites, blacks and Mexicans – who were, as Moore announces in the film, segregated in a section of the balcony which had a faux wall constructed around it.

Muslims, meanwhile, were also segregated in the balcony, with a drone flying over their heads to make sure they weren’t up to anything suspicious.

[...] it has a winning way with viewers, as can be seen in reaction shots throughout Moore’s performance that show specific audience members gradually warming to his presentation.

When commenting about gun control, for example, Moore points out that three percent of our population owns 50 percent of the guns in America, and that women — even those who own guns — have never been the perpetrators of mass killings in schools.

Add up the anecdotes, jokes, information and history, and you get all of the reasons why Moore urges voters to overcome anger, apathy, feelings of helplessness and their dislike for both candidates and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Moore also plays both sides of the fence in a canny way, consistently slinging mud at the media for covering the scandalous aspects of the campaign, yet at the same time creating media events like the allegedly “impromptu” premiere of ‘Michael Moore in Trumpland to support his own views and films.