During the documentary Michael Moore shows the rise and fall of Flint, Michigan, how (horribly) the city is doing now that most of the GM jobs are gone, what GM has been doing with the money they saved, etc. The titular thrust is Moore's efforts to meet and speak with Roger Smith, since he wants to invite the CEO to spend a day in Flint and see the damage his job cuts have wrought.

To the scores:

Roger and Me
Held My Interest: 6
Presents/Explains the Issue Clearly: 4
Contains New Information: 6
Replayability: 4
Is Entertaining: 6
Overall: 5.5

While this documentary was released in 1989, I didn't see it until August 2004, when I checked it out from the library. I'd heard of it, of course, and always been sort of curious, but never curious enough to actually seek it out for my viewing pleasure. And since it's not the type of movie that USA or TNT or AMC or any other channel is going to start showing five times a week for the rest of time (the fate that befalls most popular action movies) I was never going to see it if I didn't make the effort.

I'd seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (my review here) a month or two before I tracked down Roger and Me, and having more or less enjoyed F9/11, I thought I should check out Moore's earlier work, since I'd heard about Roger and Me forever. I knew it would be pretty dated by now, but it was free at the library, and I could afford 90 minutes of my life.

My conclusion? It wasn't bad, but it wasn't very good, and I was a bit disappointed.  Compared to the more historical PBS style documentaries I've seen, Moore is much more of an entertainer. He jumps from topic to topic quite a bit, editing segments together to keep the film moving and keep it from dragging down on one issue for too long. He's good at it, and his technique of changing things up and getting people to admit to absolutely outrageous things on camera makes for some great footage. Plus, changing the subject so quickly is a great effect; 20 straight minutes of just about anything in the film would be boring, but when those 20 minutes are chopped up into 4 or 5 blocks, and shown with other segments between them, it keeps your interest. If he just showed every attempt he made to meet with Roger Smith in a row, it would be death. But by showing one try, then other stuff, then another try 20 minutes later, it builds the impact through repetition, while not boring you with too much of the same thing over and over again.

Yes, this is probably "Documentary 101," but I don't watch many of them in this style, so it was new to me.

The fact that this film was 15 years old when I saw it was also a factor in my reaction and my review. The issues it raises are as relevant now as they were back then, but I imagine back in 1989, when globalization was first really beginning to cut American jobs in the manufacturing industry, this would have been shocking to see. By now we're used to every American company that can get away with it moving all production operations to Mexico, or Indonesia, or whatever they can go to get little brown people to make their products for a fraction of the wages they'd have to pay Americans to make them, so I watched those parts of the film with a shrug.

Of more interest were other fact-finding bits; about how GM started making cars, how the plants were when they first opened, how the US worker used unions and government protection to rise from a virtual slave to a middle class citizen, etc. The movie did more showing than telling, and a lot of the background information was fascinating. As were the pathetic attempts of Flint Michigan to reinvent itself once GM pulled up stakes. They tried for tourism, they built a huge car museum, they tried for honeymoon couples... all miserable failures.

The most amazing footage in the film was of the rich in Flint today. While most of the city is unemployed (the unemployment rate was like 5x higher than the rest of Michigan, which was in turn far higher than the US rate at the time the film was made), some of the most expensive suburbs of Detroit are just miles out of town. Seeing the contrast between the miles and miles of foreclosed homes and empty warehouses, and the unbelievable mansions on manicured lawns, was jarring. There was extensive footage of a foreclosure man going from house to house and turning people out when they'd defaulted on their loans. He took Christmas off, but was hard at work on the 24th and the 26th, and watching him stand by with a court order while people drug all the owned out of a house and dumped it on the street, Xmas trees and presents and all, so he could lock up the house that would then stand empty for years since no one had any money to move in, was both heart-wrenching and incredibly frustrating.

Worse yet was footage from some annual GM company picnic, which was held at a country club and attended by hundreds of very rich, very white, and very happy executives; people whose jobs had not been cut when all of the factories were closed and who had probably gotten bonuses as worker costs were cut. The most appalling part of it was that they had hired local people to work at the party, dressed them in old fashioned clothing, as stood them here and there as sort of living statues. This led to shot after shot of these obscenely rich drunks milling around on the grass in their expensive clothing while dead-eyed workers of every race stood motionless, in their silly costumes, like flesh and blood lawn jockeys. It's hard to imagine a more scathing portrait of the divide between upper and lower class, and Moore's eyes must have bugged out when he entered the party with his cameras and saw the entertainment.

Despite enjoying a lot of the film, and finding it sporadically entertaining, I didn't give it a very high score, and I think a lot of that is just due to the time lag. If I'd seen it in 1990 when all of the stuff in it was still fresh and topical, it would have had a much larger impact on me. Seeing it now, when this sort of thing has been going on for 15 or 20 years and is now seen as inevitable in the US, stole most of the power. The film also tended to go on and on in some segments, and I wanted it to move along more quickly, or include more facts and figures.

Overall, I don't think it was a very effective policy piece, since it never really argued for anything. That Flint has been ruined by the GM job cuts is inarguable, but what was GM's alternative? Were they really losing money? Were higher profits worth ruining the economy of much of Michigan? Did GM have a civic responsibility to Flint? Could they have retrofitted their plants with more machines and cut some jobs while not leaving entirely? Did they really save that much money by moving to Mexico? Was that their only option in the situation? I have no idea, and that's a direct fault of the film. It never told me the reality of the situation, which might have made GM look less heartless, or might have been an even more scathing indictment of their corporate greed.