Roger & Me
Given the critical consensus that Michael Moore has grown as a filmmaker since this, his 1989 debut — I could see improvement even in the arc from “Fahrenheit 9/11″ to “Sicko” — I wasn’t surprised to be unimpressed when I finally sought out “Roger & Me.” At its best, it’s a heartfelt lament for the death of an American city — Moore’s native Flint, Michigan — and at its worst it goes for cheap laughs or pads its meager running time with irrelevant filler. (I realize that the eccentric woman selling rabbits — for pets or meat — was illustrative of Flint’s grim economic state, but why go back and devote a second sequence to her?)
From the start, Moore has great instincts as an entertainer. He skillfully weaves in stock footage, popular music and his own ingratiating, folksy persona. He’s also a good muckraking journalist. He has a way of asking questions so obvious that perhaps no one else would ask them — and for making them piercing. What little sense of justice “Roger & Me” provides comes at the end when we learn that the local General Motors flak, who pathetically tried to justify CEO Roger Smith’s abandonment of Flint, was fired. He worked in Flint, after all.
The gimmick, of course, is that Moore wants to ask Smith face to face why he closed all the factories in Flint. His bumbling attempts rarely entertain — who would be surprised that Smith insulates himself from a no-name, camera-wielding rabble-rouser? Moore goes to the lobby of GM headquarters; he’s turned away. He goes back later; he’s turned away again. He tries to ask Moore a question at a stockholders’ meeting, and makes it look like Smith cuts him off and laughs about it. (I’m dubious that this happened exactly as the editing suggests.) Other low points: Moore’s “gotcha” interviews with Miss Michigan and with women on a golf course. It’s disingenuous for him to imply that these people should show a deeper understanding of Flint’s troubles. (He’s better at catching celebrities off guard — Flint native Bob Eubanks makes an appalling joke about Jews and AIDS that it’s remarkable he ever recovered from.)
Moore should be applauded, though, for his devotion to and respect for working Americans. He makes an obvious but necessary point: The fewer people get paid a living wage for a decent day’s work, the richer the CEOs get. And it’s only gotten worse since 1989. “Roger & Me” is at its post poignant when it chronicles the seemingly endless evictions carried out by a beleaguered sheriff’s deputy. He has a job to do — and he takes pains to ensure that the evictees don’t think he’s to blame — but it clearly wears on him. This is the economic reality of Flint — he has to throw people out of their homes, unpleasant as he may be, because he has no other viable options. Moore also shows former auto workers taking jobs as correctional officers to staff the jails that house Flint’s exploding criminal element. One guard proves the embodiment of irrepressible American optimism when he talks about how much he likes the job — even as a profane argument between inmates breaks out behind him.
Seen today, “Roger & Me” is more relevant as a launching point for Moore than as a contribution to the documentary form. But it certainly has its moments.