Roger & Me already qualifies as something of a phenomenon in the movie business. It’s a documentary made by a novice filmmaker who raised money for equipment by holding bingo games. It has been a sellout hit at film festivals and was picked up for distribution by a major studio, Warner Bros., which is giving it an unprecedented wide release for a documentary.
The film has also left a wake of threatened lawsuits. That’s because Roger & Me casts an unflinching eye on the human species, but finds plenty worth flinching at.
Michael Moore, a print journalist, found himself out of work in 1987 and decided to make a movie about his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Flint has been slowly dying under the massive layoffs of General Motors, the corporation that virtually built the city.
The film is an amazing document – angry, outraged, hilarious. Throughout, Moore attempts to make contact with Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors. This is a shrewd way to give the film a backbone, because of course the shlumpy Moore, an unshapely, disheveled character in oversize parka and trucker’s cap, doesn’t have a chance of getting to the high and mighty Roger Smith.
Along the way, Moore finds absurdity and eccentricity in Flint. He rides along with one local who has a steady job: the guy who forecloses on homeowners. He’s a matter-of-fact fellow, untouched by the tragedy of people losing their homes. Evicting someone on Christmas Eve, he helpfully suggests that the family lay down their Christmas tree on the sidewalk so that it doesn’t blow over in the wind.
Moore finds a string of Stepford people, as well as soullessly bureaucratic GM execs (one protests, “Because a guy is an automobile executive does not make him inhuman”). Flint’s tourism director, a man with a crazed, zombie-like stare, is upbeat about the town’s efforts to attract tourists. For instance, there’s Autoworld, an indoor tourist mecca that features a re-creation of the town’s now-dying main street and an audio-animatronic assembly-line worker singing “Me and My Buddy” to the robot worker who is taking his job.
There are sequences in the film – all real, remember – that strongly suggest we have reached the end of civilization as we know it, such as the party given by Flint’s wealthy upper class where unemployed citizens are hired to stand around as human statues. It is a strange picture of where we are today, and it would be profoundly disturbing were it not for Moore’s all-encompassing sense of humor.
That the film is vastly entertaining is testimony to Moore’s eye for the telling detail, but also to the wonder of sticking a camera into the world and discovering what is there.
First published in The Herald, January 12, 1990
Whatever Michael Moore has become since then – and some of what he has become has been insufferable – let us remember his debut film as a rollicking event. The movie was a turning point in the history of the documentary film, although it’s hard to believe it was over 30 years ago now. Would also like to say that the film’s poster tag line – “The story of a rebel and his mike,” a play on the campaign for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure – is the last time I can remember the shortened spelling of microphone as mike rather than the now-ubiquitous mic. A sore spot for me.
WHAT A FEELING! 