Good question. And although it is half-heartedly pursued and, in the end, lazily dismissed on the feeble sub-Bennite grounds that policies are more important than personalities, Morgan Spurlock's jokey film deserves a smidgeon of regard for simply asking it in the first place. There is room for a tough, journalistic documentary presented by someone who really did want to know the answer. But this isn't it.
Spurlock is the film-maker who created Super Size Me, the uproarious piece of anti-corporate performance art in which he undertook to eat every meal at McDonald's for 30 days. His new project is much larger and vaguer: he's looking for Osama bin Laden. But unlike his burger grossout, it's clear from the get-go that he isn't going to go through with it. He isn't going to find him or even look for him, not really. The idea is that Spurlock will pretend to undergo weapons and survival training, like some pint-sized Schwarzenegger, and then, with much wacky Michael-Moore-ish satire - and changing the comedy tack entirely - he will go around some Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries pretending to look for the al-Qaida kingpin, asking the locals sunny, faux-naif questions and of course arriving at impeccably liberal conclusions that he had scripted before ever leaving home.
There was a time when the whereabouts of the world's most notorious terrorist was a serious matter. After the World Trade Centre attacks, many thought that the war on Afghanistan would lead to Bin Laden being led in chains up Fifth Avenue, on his way to the electric chair. But it didn't happen and, as all the world knows, the political classes of Washington and London encouraged the world to believe that nabbing Saddam was not merely just as good as nabbing Bin Laden but sort of the same thing.
But where is he? Well, it seems very likely indeed that Bin Laden would want to hide out in a Muslim country boasting remote mountains and nuclear weapons: a country reluctant to pursue him for fear of catastrophic civil tumult, a country which the United States could not invade for fear of the locals hitting the red button. This would appear to mean ... Pakistan. And that is the conclusion cautiously arrived at by Spurlock. But he seems unaware of the obvious, subsequent questions: could it be that the US government has a much, much clearer idea of where Bin Laden is than they are letting on, together with a shrewder, more pessimistic assessment of the problems involved in ever capturing him?
With insistent, fatuous naivety, Spurlock doesn't attempt the simplest analysis of politics or motives; he simply galumphs around various countries, variously amusing and annoying the people he meets. He visits Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Spurlock is sometimes spurned: a very uncomfortable interview with Saudi teens is abruptly halted by their teachers. A glowering official implies that 9/11 was a piece of movie trickery like the talking pig in Babe. Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem shove him and his camera crew in the street, eliciting from Spurlock a pained, despairing cry of: "Dude!" Some Bin Ladens are zanily looked up in the Saudi phone-book, but the Bin Laden family network is never seriously addressed.
This isn't the only thing going on, however. Spurlock's vegan partner, whom we saw looking aghast in Super-Size Me, is with child. Spurlock has decided to set off on his quest, while she is well and truly up the duff, with a solemn sense of what-kind-of-a-world-is-this-for-kids? But gosh! He's got to get back in time for the birth. Will he, do you think? Will get back home just in time, armed with his pre-cooked humanist insight, to see his baby getting born? After all, a nice apolitical "knocked up" vibe won't hurt the box office. I have never suspected a film of mendacious editing and out-and-out fakery more than this one.
Spurlock, with massive condescension, informs us ultimately that it doesn't matter where Bin Laden is, because the conditions that create hatred and fear and anti-Americanism all over the world are still in place - which is a convenient sentiment both for a documentary-maker who doesn't seriously want to find him, and a government which suspects that failing to find him is becoming an embarrassment. And it's rubbish.
The fact is that Bin Laden matters. Inspirational leadership matters. If he was caught, it would be a blow to al-Qaida, martyrdom notwithstanding, not least because it would mean that one of Bin Laden's most trusted comrades was prepared to sell him out for the $25m reward money. When Michael Moore went on the hunt for the General Motors boss Roger Smith in his 1989 film Roger and Me, he really did look for him, and find him, after a fashion. He could have abandoned the search on the grounds that it didn't matter and that corporate exploitation of the blue-collar workers operated independently of any individual, no matter how mighty. But quite rightly, he sensed that this would have been an annoying and feeble cop-out. No such tremor of common sense or journalistic nous troubled Morgan Spurlock.