Directed and written by Michael Moore. Rating unavailable.

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When George W. Bush took the American throne in November of 2000, he did so through the good offices of his brother, the governor of the state that made the final coin toss, and the efforts of his father, appointer of the Supreme Court justices who called heads.

Fahrenheit 9/11 begins there, but what really got Michael Moore going in this incendiary new documentary was the almost Shakespearean relationship between the Bush family and that of a certain Osama bin Laden. (Remember him?)

The dance of the Bushes and certain Saudis goes back for decades, culminating in members of the bin Laden family mysteriously flying from the U.S. when all other air traffic was grounded directly after September 11. And there are eerie parallels between the black sheep of each clan, somehow determined to both subvert and outdo the family patriarch at each turn.

Saudi money helped prop up the younger Bush's failed business attempts, and Moore's biggest bombshell comes with the revelation that another fellow who washed out of Junior's Air National Guard unit later became lawyer for bin Ladens looking to invest in the Texas oil patch. Coincidence? Sure, if you think Dick Cheney's stint as head of Halliburton had nothing to do with the reconstruction and supply company being readier for war than Colin Powell ever was.

The director is relatively disciplined here, sticking to areas like Bush senior's ongoing work on behalf of the Saudis and against American interests. Although Moore doesn't mention this, Pappy's own father faced a federal indictment for running Nazi front groups during the Second World War. He does point out, in passing, that if the Clintons had this many skeletons in the family closet, Bubba would have been burned at the stake. (Oh, right, a blowjob is worse than treason.) Somehow, Junior has had a free pass. Until now.

As in Bowling for Columbine, the corpulent gadfly isn't above showboating for effect, and he often steps on his interviewee's lines. But one can't remain hardened when he follows one Flint, Michigan, woman's journey from gung ho flag-waver to grieving mother--especially when the moving sequence comes so soon after images of Iraqis slaughtered in the battle for their hearts and minds.

There's much more to discuss, or even quibble with, here; Moore's treatment of the Patriot Act and its trashing of civil liberties is too cursory, especially for a film whose title evokes book-burning. But the portrait it draws of W as a pampered, calculating fool is indelible. The film's single most damning image, in fact, is of nothing--or, more precisely, of Bush doing nothing for a full seven minutes after being informed that a second plane has slammed into the World Trade Center. Network news footage from the day catches him biting his lip and staring into space--wondering, if he's capable of that much imagination, what a real president would do.