After watching Michael Moore’s latest (and last?) film, Capitalism: A Love Story (read my review here), I started thinking about his previous movies. Despite my enjoyment of his work, I realized that I’d never actually seen his very first film: Roger & Me.

Hello, Netflix!

Released in 1989 (though Mr. Moore was working on the film for several years prior to that), Roger & Me is an unflinching look at the devastating effect that the shutdown of several General Motors factories (eventually resulting in the firing of approx. 80,000 workers) had on Moore’s home-town of Flint, Michigan.

As Mr. Moore admits on the DVD’s commentary track, he not only had never made a movie before Roger & Me, but he knew very little about what went into making movies. But he (and a small team of partners) taught themselves everything they needed to know (about filming, sound, editing, etc.) over the course of assembling their film. This gives Roger & Me a raw, unpolished, feel which, to my mind, wound up working in Mr. Moore’s favor in enhancing the film’s effectiveness. This isn’t a slick-looking documentary. This feels like a film put together by a bunch of average folks, trying to address a situation that they felt passionately about.  That passion is another key to the film’s strength.

Right from the beginning, Mr. Moore is a major (perhaps THE major) character in his film. Roger & Me opens with a montage of Mr. Moore’s home-movies, as he introduces himself in voice-over and describes his early years growing up in Flint. Mr. Moore’s on-screen involvement in his films has by now grown tiresome to some, but here his presence helps ground the film as a whole. Moore grew up in Flint, his father (and, it turns out, many other members of his extended family) worked for GM. At one point in the film, following a sheriff’s deputy evicting people from their homes who couldn’t pay their rent after having been laid off by GM, Moore discovers that one of the young men being evicted is someone he went to high school with. This is a personal story for Mr. Moore, about HIS community, and his anger and frustration at the way GM abandoned Flint underline every frame of the film.  This lends the over-all film a gravity that a more polished but less-personal film would have lacked, I think.

As always, it can be hard to separate a discussion of one of Mr. Moore’s films from a discussion of his politics. The central question of what sort of responsibility a corporation has to its employees (and the communities in which the corporation grew prosperous) is a thorny one, and perhaps not so simplistic as it is presented here. Still, Moore’s key point, that GM shut down its plants in Flint (throwing tens of thousands of lives into turmoil and devastating Flint) DESPITE THEIR BRINGING IN RECORD PROFITS DURING THOSE YEARS is a hard one to argue against, and Mr. Moore spends much of his film showing us in great detail how hard so many families of Flint had it when the company pulled up stakes.

Mr. Moore has drawn some criticism, over the years, not just for his liberal leanings but also for some of his filmmaking techniques. In 2006, the film Manufacturing Dissent (which I have not seen) accused Moore of dishonesty in the making of Roger & Me. While it does seem that Moore played things a bit fast and loose in his editing of the footage (the eviction scenes intercut at the climax of the film with GM chairman Roger Smith’s cheery Christmas message did not actually take place at the same day), I can’t say that I get terribly worked up about those sorts of editing games. (In that specific example, does it matter if the two events did not actually happen simultaneously? Does that in any way undercut Mr. Moore’s point about General Motors’ uncaring attitude towards the effect of their plant closings on tens of thousands of American workers? Not to me.)

Roger & Me is a tough film to watch (and not just for the did-I-really-just-see-that graphic scene in which a former GM worker, reduced to selling rabbits for meat, kills and skins a rabbit before our eyes). In today’s tough economic climate, the film is more relevant than ever. Whether you agree with Mr. Moore or disagree with him, back in 1989 he was clearly already wrestling with some of the key issues that face our Democratic and Capitalistic society as we move forward into the twenty-first century. Are those two ideas compatible? What sort of nation do we aspire to be? What is stopping us from getting there?

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, starts off strong.  The film juxtaposes narration from a movie about the fall of the Roman Empire with images of the United States of America from the last year and a half.  Moore’s point is clear.

It is hardly surprising, for anyone who has ever seen a Michael Moore film before, that Mr. Moore is taking this position.  After movie after movie filled with enormous criticism of the actions of the auto industry, the medical & health insurance industries, and more, Capitalism: A Love Story seems to be the ultimate, logical progression of Mr. Moore’s anger: an attempted condemnation of the overarching system of life here in the U.S.: Capitalism.

So how well does he make his case?

After the terrific opening, I felt the first half of the film floundered somewhat.  Mr. Moore presents several anguishing stories, each of which are certainly tragic and worthy of outrage.  (One vignette that sticks with me is the plight of a group of kids sentenced to lengthy stays in a privately-owned juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, PA, by a judge in the pocket of the owners of that center.) But this first half of the film feels all over the place.  The vignettes are sad, but the connection to Moore’s overall message about the inherent evils of Capitalism seems thin.  (Judges and other important officials have certainly been bribed in non-Capitalist countries…)

There are other flaws with this first half.  Early on we meet several families being evicted from their homes, and we’re clearly meant to feel great sympathy for them.  But we don’t learn more about the circumstances of their evictions until much later in the film.  Without that background, I didn’t find the images of these families to be all that effective — frankly I responded the opposite way, reacting against what I perceived as Moore’s attempt at manipulation of the audience.  Yes, families being kicked out of their homes is a terrible sight.  But until and unless we, the audience, learn the reasons behind their evictions, watching those images unfold did not, for me, help Moore make his point.

Then there is the time spent with actor Wallace Shawn.  I absolutely adore Wallace Shawn (and not just for his most famous role as Vizzini in The Princess Bride), but what the heck do I care what he has to say about the economic situation in America today?  That’s nice that he seems to agree with Mr. Moore, but so what?  I was quite perplexed by the focus on Mr. Shawn in the film’s early-going.  It just added to my sense that the first half of the film was bouncing around aimlessly.

It sort of feels like Mr. Moore was working on a movie and then, once the economic collapse happened last year, he decided to shape his film around that topic — but he didn’t want to lose the material he’d already been working on.  (Having done a good deal of reading about the film after seeing it, it does seem that Moore was hard-at-work on this film before the collapse last year.)  The result is a film that, while extraordinarily powerful at points, loses some of its effectiveness because it seems to lurch constantly from topic to topic.

This is particularly frustrating because, in the second half of the film, once Moore starts directly addressing the recent economic collapse, the film really takes off.  Obviously there is a lot of anger out there about what went down, and rightly so, and Moore is extraordinarily effective at cutting through all of the complicated talk and double-speak to shine a harsh light on the actions of many in the finance industry and our government.  The exchange in which Mr. Moore tries to get an understandable explanation for derivatives out of a pleasant-enough-sounding Wall Street banker is a riot (and makes my stomach clench), as does some frankly shocking exchanges with members of Congress about how little they knew about the bailout they approved.  Some statements by Rep. Marcy Kapur (D-Ohio) are particularly eye-opening.

All of the above is intercut with several of the stunts for which Michael Moore is known for (and which you might have seen in the film’s trailers), such as his arrival at AIG headquarters with an armored car so that he can demand the return of the bailout money, or running yellow crime scene tape around blocks of Wall Street.  These are great moments.  But overall, the film is pretty light on Mr. Moore’s trademark humor.  The man seems clearly frustrated that, after twenty years of making movies (and TV shows such as his fantastic The Angry Truth series) about these types of subjects, these problems seem to have gotten worse rather than better.

Hey, I am too!

While a far cry from his strongest work (which, for me, would be Bowling For Columbine), I still found Capitalism: A Love Story to be a worthwhile (even if at times frustrating and aggravating) film.  Agree with him or disagree with him, Mr. Moore is unafraid to look head-on at the many enormous problems facing our nation today.  For that he has my respect, and my attention.