The U.S. Treasury Department may have struck the first blow when it announced it was investigating Michael Moore for possibly violating America’s trade embargo with Cuba by taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to the island for medical treatment and documenting it in his new film “Sicko,” which debuts here in Cannes on Saturday.

But Moore, never one to shy away from a righteous fight, isn’t playing defense. I talked with him by phone Sunday night — I was in Cannes and he was in New York, putting the final touches on his film — and he displayed his usual mix of passion, outrage, humor and bravado. “Why would they do it now? I have no idea,” he said of the government maneuver. “Were they just sitting around there and somebody said, “Hey, this is opening in Cannes next week. We have to do something.” Are they that divorced from reality or the popular culture to know that isn’t the right thing to do? I think maybe they thought, ‘We’re going to chance it here to try to paint him with some Castro brush or whatever.’ I think when people see the film, there is going to have to be a lot of rewriting done on the initial stories that went out last week in terms of what really happens in the film and what we really did.”

He reserved special scorn for former senator and possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson, who’d written an opinion piece accusing Moore of being soft on Castro. “I didn’t know he’d been appointed the official spokesperson against the film,” Moore laughed.

All the while, what is shaping up as a formidable Moore team was gearing up for a counterattack. The Weinstein Co., which produced the film, has enlisted the services of David Boies, the chief attorney in Al Gore’s recount battle against George Bush in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, as well as political consultant Chris Lehane. And today, it unleashed a letter Moore has sent to Thompson that is full of what can only be called opposition research. Posted on Moore’s own Web site, michaelmoore.com, the letter first makes sport of Thompson’s fondness for Montecristo cigars from Havana and suggests that the cigar-chomping senator may have violated the trade embargo himself. More seriously, it accuses Thompson of wanting to cut funding for AIDS research, cozying up to former Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family has had a financial interest in the HCA hospital chain, and raising “hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the health care and insurance industries.” Hey, how about debating me about health care, Moore challenges.
How will all this play in Cannes? Europeans will probably shake their heads over the American healthcare system, and most of them admit that the whole Cuban trade embargo is a mystifying issue to them. But my colleagues Scott Roxborough and Gregg Goldstein report that foreign distributors who will be handling the film, such as TFM Distribution in France and Gaga Communications in Japan, are “waiting to see the reaction of the Cannes audience before forming a promotion strategy for the film.” In the meantime, they’re promised a good show — both off screen and on. (Gregg Kilday)