Arts/Review

lrony the vehicle in Moore’s
angry, funny film on layoffs

ROGER & ME. A documentary directed
by Michael Moore. Featuring the citizens
of Flint, Michigan. A Warner Brothers
release. At Famous Players theatres.

Director Michael Moore, son of the
American working class, has produced a
documentary that takes on corporate
America, its machinations and the effects

thereof in a manner that uses humour '

rather than lectures to get its point across.

Roger & Me is the brainchild of the
former editor of the U.S, alternative maga-
zine, Mother Jones, who returned to his
hometown of Flint, Mich., just as General
Motors began the first of a series of 11 plant
closures that ultimately cost the area 30,000
jobs.

Your response to this engrossing, tightly
edited documentary that doesn’t really feel
like one will probably be, ultimately, anger.
But Moore, utilizing a penchant for dry
humour and classic understatement that
seems typical of educated, post-war North
Americans, will get you there with a min-
imum of preaching and maximum of
laughs, which is a pretty effective way to
deliver a message.

The Roger in the film’s title is Roger
Smith, chair of General Motors Corp.,
who, we're told in brief sentences, sacri-
ficed the livelihoods of thousands of Flint
residents by moving operations south of the
border to Mexico’s cheap-labour - zones,
where people work for 70 cents an hour.

The “Me” is of course Moore, who. dur-

ing the approximately three years it took to
make this documentary, dogged Smith’s
trail unsuccessfully until finally nailing the
corporation’s top officer at a company
Christmas party. Getting to talk to Roger
was the ultimate purpose of this exercise,
but not its sole focus. Rather, that theme Is
woven throughout the many exposures to
hard times the probing camera uncovers in
this industrial city a few miles north of
Detroit.

We meet many of these hard times cases
in Roger & Me, as well as some the individ-
uals whose job it is to bring down the
hammer of corporate America’s board-
room decisions. So we get to know Fred
Ross, deputy sheriff of Genesee County,
during his travels to the dilapidated houses
rented by the former auto workers and their

families. And we watch as Fred and his
helpers break into those houses, tell the
occupants to get dressed, and begin moving
their furniture out to the curb.

We also get to see the famed Western
entrepreneurial spirit, albeit on a small
scale, through a woman who raises rabbits
for food and pet sales in cramped hutches in
her back yard. It helps supplement the
social assistance, but even this humble mea-
sure to stave off the wolf at the door is
doomed: we find she’s been informed by
county health authorities that it will cost her
several thousand dollars to bring the opera-
tion up to legal standards.

And there’s the psychological cost of
corporate manoeuvering. Moore interviews
a high school friend shooting a few baskets
in the recreation yard of a local mental
institution. The former auto worker relates
how one night he was so disturbed by the
thought of another impending layoff that he
deserted his post mid-shift and took off.
What really did him in, the man relates, was
that as he sped away from the ultimately
doomed plant, the song he tuned in on the
car radio was, “Wouldn’t it be Nice?” by the
Beach Boys.

Obligingly, the song fills the soundtrack

_in the following scene, a long pan of empty
‘neighbourhood streets with house after

house, and business after business, boarded
up.

Moore lets us know that covering a mas-

sive industrial shutdown is not easy. He’s.
evicted from the premises of one plant while

attempting to interview employees partici-
pating in a ceremony to mark its closure.
The film crew is shown the door numerous
times at private clubs, the General Motors
office building in downtown Detroit, and
several other haunts of the elusive Roger
Smith.

But irony is the real vehicle of this film,
and the director fuels it with statements
from local and state boosters promoting a
variety of gimmicks to blunt the edge of
depression. The interviews of some memor-
able promo flacks whose glitzy promotion
of these circuses — a $100-million auto
theme park, a major hotel, all subsequent
financial failures — are contrasted by the
stark images of reality in Flint’s increasingly
mean streets.

And Moore uses his irony to key effect in

scoring bullseyes on ahs favourite target,
- America’s icons. In glib sentences arch-
conservative performers Pat Boone and
Anita Bryant, in town for performances,
reach into their bags of schlock and extract
phoney optimistic homilies for the bereft.
Says Bryant, a former GM trade show
worker: “Take it one day at a time. I read
that Margaret Thatcher says, ‘Cheer up,
America.’ ”

There has been some comment in the film
industry press that certain incidents aired in
Roger & Me did not happen at the time
when Moore’s film suggests these did. For
example, a visit by Ronald Reagan to the
city, in which he takes a dozen unemployed
workers out for pizza, apparently took

place in 1980, well before the layoffs and

before Reagan became president of the Uni-
ted States.

Chalk it up to artistic licence, and enjoy
this film. Roger & Me, a funny but also
angry documentary about the cold reality of
Morning in America, is a worthy compan-
ion piece to the likes of Harlan County,
USA, and one that wisely eschews pedantics
for humour and deliberate understatement.
In Roger & Me, the footage does the talk-
ing. R 5
— Dan Keeton

Filmmaker Michael Moore.

Never mind GM, it’s ca
system that's unfair

The media response to Rosen & Mevhas,
while bringing due attention to this impor-
tant film, shown both the prevalent shal-
lowness and perverse and distorted values
that are so much a part of contemporary
North American culture.

Roger & Me is, without exaggeration, a
great film — a documentary that succeeds,
without preaching or dry analysis, to skewer
not only General Motors and company
head Roger Smith, but also capitalism itself.

Director Michael Moore has succeeded,
with humour and with sensitivity to the
working class of Flint, Mich., to capture
both the bitter pain and the sad desperation
of a community when a corporation pulls
out, creating mass unemployment. But even

The colour transparencies of famed
Canadian photographic artist Jeff Wall
are currently on display at the Vancouver
Art Gallery until March 19. Wall is des-
cribed as, among other things, a “‘political
polemicist” and his works cover themes
such as evictions, “illusions of abundance,
the realities of scarcity and the politics of
personal, public and workplace relation-
ships.”

ee ae

Vancouver playwright John Lazarus
has a new production slated for the Fire-
hall Theatre in east Vancouver, Feb. 7-
March 4. The play, Homework and
Curtains, runs Tuesdays to Sundays at 8
p.m. with a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m.
Phone 689-0926.

ers ee
An El Salvador double bill is in store for

Jeff Wall on display; El Salvador double bill

viewers Feb. 2-Feb. 4 at the Vancouver East
Cinema. Romero, on the life and assassina-
tion of the concerned archbishop Oscar
Romero, is on at 7:30 p.m., and Salvador,
Oliver Stone’s powerful indictment of U.S.
support for the country’s fascist regimes,
runs at 9:30 p.m. One admission for both
films.

* of *

Tube Talk: KCTS public television in
Seattle acknowledges Black History Month
with several programs throughout Febru-
ary. Highlights include the Frontline show,
“Throwaway People”, on the “black
underclass” of Washington, D.C., on
Tuesday, Feb. 13, 8 p.m.; an American
Playhouse production, “Zora Is My
Name”, on writer Zora Neale Hurston’s
life and work, on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 10
p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 18, 4 a.m.; The
Musical Legacy of Roland Hayes on Sun-

day, Feb. 25, 11 a.m. and All Day & All
Night: Memories from Beale Street Musi-
cians on that date at 12 noon.

1 ok of

The Cousteau Odyssey: The Search
for Atlantis about the famed underwater
explorer’s search for the mythical lost
island, a two-part series on Saturdays
beginning Feb. 10, 9 p.m.; “Prince Caspian
and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader,”
based on the second and third books of
C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia,
Sunday, Feb. 11, 4 p.m.; “The Bomb’s
Lethal Legacy,” on the 30 million cubic
feet of nuclear waste in eastern Washing-
ton state resulting from the U.S.’ bomb
program, on the series Nova, Tuesday, Feb.
13, 7 p.m. and Wednesday, Feb. 14, 12
noon.

10 e Pacific Tribune, January 29, 1990

more important, Roger & Me lambastes thei ;

rich for their hypocrisy and their stupidity.
Who can forget the two rich women who

spend their idle days playing golf and tell
Moore: “The problem with people is that —

they don’t know how to work _ hard
enough.” Or the bigwigs of Flint who stage
a Great Gatsby party and hire the unem-

ployed to be human mannequins as a ges- —

ture of compassion.

Unfortunately so much of the controv-
ersy regarding the film has focused on the
now infamous “bunny incident,” in which a
rabbit is killed and skinned on screen. Some
critics and members of the public have
expressed outrage at this scene, yet the fact
that the rabbit is killed to-help a single
woman find some money to survive from
day to day is ignored. And it is somewhat
ironic that people are outraged by the death
ofa rabbit while the on-screen shooting of a

black man by the Flint police provokes no j

outrage.

The real outrage should be the human
cost of capitalism — the thousands who
are going through the daily death of being
unemployed and of having their dignity
snatched away from them.

In an interview with the Canadian Trib-
une last September, Moore said that Roger
& Me was made for working people; not for
critics or the “artsy” crowd. That some
people want to focus on one rabbit or ques-
tion whether the film is “unfair” to GM
exemplifies the perverted attitudes of some
as much as the film itself does.

Moore said it best: ‘“‘Some critics have

said this film is not fair to GM. Well, the _

only thing that’s not fair in this society is
people without money being screwed day

after day after day. If this film makes those .

with money feel a little uncomfortable —
good.”
Roger & Me is an important film. Go see
it.
— Paul Ogresko