Polarizing, yes, but courageous enough to tackle the politics

It's so obvious that it's anticlimactic, really. 9/11 even shows up in the title, and there's scarcely an argument that hasn't been made for or against the highest-grossing documentary of all time. Yet Michael Moore's molten jeremiad was the climax of a moment of national -- OK, international -- doubt about the current Bush White House and the war in Iraq. It's a moment that seems to have grown only more complicated in the two years since the movie's release.

Other films have contended with Sept. 11 -- from the allegorical (Steven Spielberg's 2005 ``War of the Worlds") to the obscure (Ken Jacobs's tremendous 2002 video ``Circling Zero: We See Absence "). But Moore's was the rare one to contend with the day's political aftermath. He didn't care whether it was ``too soon." In the process, he provoked a host of polemical documentaries of many political persuasions and varying quality.

``Fahrenheit 9/11 " was also the only one to strike lightning with the public. Part melodrama, part psychodrama, part depressing farce, it was an all-purpose polarizer. For a while, it looked as though the film could have political impact, too. Before it opened in the spring of 2004, ``Fahrenheit " was all anyone could speculate about. ``Will it get John Kerry elected?" the media wondered, more or less.

All of this upstaged the movie as a filmmaking achievement. Armed with a library-load of original and archival footage, Moore took us from the bungle of the 2000 election to the invasion of Iraq to Lila Lipscomb , who lost a son in the war and drifts around the Washington Mall in a state of bereavement.

As artists struggle with the morality of dealing with 9/11, you realize that Moore as a nonfiction director has the advantage of his conviction. Paul Greengrass's ``United 93" was masterful moviemaking, but to what end? And Oliver Stone's ``World Trade Center" was a tribute to heroism that was strenuously apolitical. Apparently 9/11 is the one event powerful enough to make someone as outspoken as Stone bashful.

Moore's shameless partisanship, on the other hand, allowed for a degree of political transparency. He risked resentment. To him, tastelessness wasn't a crime. Equivocation was.

Wesley Morris is a Globe movie critic. He can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.