Review Date: 12:28:0:3
It’s easy to forget that Michael Moore used to be a comedian. At least, he used to be marketed as a comedian. God only knows why. There’s very little comedy in this, his first film…unless the slow, painful death of Flint, Michigan strikes you as funny.
On September 16, 1908, philanthropist William Durant opened the first General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. By the middle 1980s, GM was registered record- breaking profits in the face of the Regan-Bush—you know, the elected Bush—regime. At the same time, Chairman Roger B. Smith announced the closing of eleven plants in Flint. The closings left thirty thousand people unemployed and quickly sent the city into a financial nosedive. All attempts to revive the area failed miserably and today Flint is as much an urban wasteland as any ghetto this side of Afghanistan.
In the midst of this chaos, a man and his film crew embarked on a hopeless quest: To track down Roger Smith, convince him to visit Flint, and perhaps spend the day with exploring the consequences of these plant closings.
With Roger & Me Michael Moore propelled himself and his beleaguered little city into the spotlight. The bulk of the film chronicles three years of Flint’s decline, the camera shadowing Mike as he peruses Roger, the film’s “star”. From the blasé opulence of the Grosse Point Yacht Club to the stone façade’s of GM’s World Headquarters, Mike bangs his head against corporate indifference and gets diddly for his efforts.
Except, of course, for the rolls of film, the TV show, and the lucrative career as a roving trouble maker. That all came later. To see Roger & Me is to see a textbook example of what the suits called “guerrilla filmmaking” until it won an Oscar. Shot on 16mm by Moore and his bare-bones crew, it’s amazing that the finished product comes out looking so well. It’s amazing there aren’t boom mikes hanging into every frame. It’s amazing this movie was finished at all, to say nothing about it getting distribution from a major studio.
But it’s the scenes from Flint that really stick with you; these straightforward, ground level portraits of a community in meltdown. We watch as the city pours millions into downtown tourist attractions. And, when that fails, millions more go into a brand new, state-of-the-art prison. We see unemployed autoworkers struggle to make ends meet inside those prisons, and at the local Taco Bell. We see Sheriff’s Deputy Fred Ross evicting one person after another. We see the dark side of America’s economy laid out in all its grainy horror.
The actual “truth” of this movie is immaterial. The very possibility of Flint is enough to move me to action. That’s what this film does. That is its purpose, its very reason. It exists to move. Not just move, but move. To get you up off your collective ass and do something about the injustices going on around you.
GM is, was, and looks long to be one of the richest corporations on the planet. Far from improving, Flint has grown even worse, as you probably saw in Bowling for Columbine. And just look what’s happened to America…
I’m all with Mr. Moore on this one: Roger & Me is still quite relevant, fourteen years after its release. That scares the shit out of me and it should scare the shit out of you, too…but, then again, what do I know? I’m just another angry liberal with a web page, right?
Right. Well, fine. But forget about all that for a second. Or, hell, one hour, thirty minutes and thirty-two seconds. Roger & Me is remarkably a-political, as it is a much more personal project than anything else Michael Moore has done. At the same time, it’s also his quietest. Mike doesn’t do a lot of narration here, preferring to let his subjects tell the story for him. Politicians, musicians, Amway saleswomen—hell, even the host of Newlywed Game shares his views on All of This (along with the occasional bit of bad taste). It’s not just a matter of presenting two sides of some issue. Instead, Moore presents people and lets them tell their stories, which as a whole feed the story of Flint.
And people call this biased. If that helps them sleep, fine, but the fact remains that Flint exists. Just thank good someone had the stones to tell its story.
Gosh, this is supposed to be a review isn’t it? Yet this documentary format manages to completely strip me of my time honored time-wasters. There’s no script to complain about. No bean counters to deride. The direction is as scattered as in any first-time indie. There’s just Michael Moore, his crew, and the town he calls his home. So what can I say?
Only that this is one of the greatest horror movies of the past thirty years. The fact that people mistake it for a comedy only underlines their ignorance of the world around them. Sure, Moore’s dark sense of humor creeps into things, but you get the feeling he (and a lot of other Flint citizens) is only laughing to keep from screaming. That kind of desperate attitude infects the film, and it’s the feeling I always get as the credits role and the Beach Boys sing “Wouldn’t it be Nice”.
Because it would be nice. But most of the time, in American and around the world, it isn’t.
I can only say this with absolute certainty: The picture this movie paints, the world that it creates, is too horribly bleak to be anything but real. And even if it’s all complete fabrication, the very idea of it should be enough to move us towards change. I don’t want to live in Michael Moore’s America. But I have no other choice but to believe I do.
Whether you do or not, Roger & Me is too good, too powerful, a movie to miss. So there.
Gs
