By BRUCE HEADLAM


TORONTO - Hypocrite. Propagandist. Egomaniac. Glutton. Exploiter. Embarrassment. Slob. These are a few of the criticisms that have been lobbed at Michael Moore since his filmmaking career began, and these are just the ones from liberals.

In documentary films like “Roger & Me,” about how General Motors abandoned Flint, Michigan; “Fahrenheit 9/11,” on the Bush administration’s handling of the terrorist attacks; and “Sicko,” on the American health system, Mr. Moore has become the postindustrial version of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. This year’s film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” is a full-out assault on the very idea of American free enterprise.

In the United States Mr. Moore’s conservative critics may decry his popularity, but his films and best-selling books are far more popular outside the country, especially in Britain, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan.

Mr. Moore seems to crystallize a contradiction in the elite liberal sensibility, one that is still unresolved. For decades, some liberals have craved their own class warrior to take the fight unapologetically to the conservatives. But faced with Mr. Moore they recoil, claiming that kind of aggressiveness is somehow at odds with the notion of being a liberal.

“I don’t think they like a guy who is hovering around 300 pounds and walks around in a ball cap who comes from a factory town and talks like where he comes from,” Mr. Moore said over lunch in Toronto the day before the premiere of his film at the festival here. “People want to have polite conversation at their wine-and-cheese functions.”

In private conversation he speaks slowly and softly. For someone who has been accused of bending facts to suit his arguments, he seems to have an almost pathological precision about dates and specific incidents.

As much as Mr. Moore sometimes plays a comic-book version of class warrior, his politics are not grounded in class as much as in Roman Catholicism. Growing up in Michigan, he attended parochial school and intended to go into the seminary, inspired by the priests and nuns who, at least until Pope John Paul II, inherited a long tradition of social justice and activism in the American church.

Along with a moral imperative, Catholicism also gave a method. Mr. Moore idolized the Berrigan brothers, the radical priests who introduced street theater into their activism. Their actions influenced some of Mr. Moore’s best-remembered stunts.

The central conceit in “Roger & Me” was his futile pursuit to interview the chief executive of General Motors, Roger Smith. And in “Sicko,” Mr. Moore took ailing rescue workers from the September 11 attacks to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because detainees there were receiving excellent health care. “Although I’m trying to say things I want to say politically, I primarily want to make an entertaining movie,” he said. “If the art of the movie doesn’t work, the politics won’t get through.”

There are fewer of the trademark Moore stunts in “Capitalism,” a sprawling 126-minute film that tries to connect data points across the economy, including the bailout, financial deregulation, privatized juvenile detention centers, the collapse of the American auto business (again), Goldman Sachs’s influence in Washington, the crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo, New York, the Florida condo market and an oldfashioned sit-in at a Chicago factory.

In one scene the neighbor of an evicted family in Florida argues with the enforcer sent from the bank, telling him if too many people are locked out, “the value of everybody else’s house goes down.” That, on a more vast scale, is precisely the rationale offered by the White House for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

“The bailout in and of itself - the idea of protecting people’s pension funds and hoping that everything doesn’t go down a rathole - that’s not a bad thing,” Mr. Moore said. “It’s the way it was done.”

After the screening in Toronto, Mr. Moore took questions from audience members eager to know what they should do. He offered some broad suggestions, stressing that he worried that Democrats in the United States would begin to abandon President Obama (whom he enthusiastically supports) now that the election is won.

Pushed harder on Mr. Obama, Mr. Moore said that he hoped for the best, but feared the influence of Goldman Sachs on the administration. Finally, he just shrugged. “You know,” he said, “the next movie may be about him.”