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… [continued]
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.… [continued]