Michael Moore’s account of Flint after the factory closures is funny, angry and often distressing. Its pursuit of a corporate villain simplifies the damage, but the people living with it make the film worth seeing.
Roger & Me is a funny, forceful documentary that becomes most affecting when Michael Moore stops being its chief attraction. His home town of Flint, Michigan, is losing factory jobs as General Motors closes plants, and he wants the company’s chairman, Roger B. Smith, to answer for the damage. The pursuit gives the film a simple task to follow. It also makes an enormous economic problem look rather too much like one man’s fault. The people in Flint make it worth seeing.
As director, writer and on-screen participant, Michael Moore makes no pretence of standing outside the story. The personal connection helps explain why he keeps asking, and why the closures cannot be treated as something unfortunate happening elsewhere. His presence gives an unfamiliar viewer someone to follow through the town’s troubles, without requiring a lecture before every encounter. It is an effective way into a documentary, although the hunt for the chairman is less absorbing than the encounters with residents.
Kevin Rafferty’s cinematography is most valuable in the passages following evictions, where keeping the camera with the residents is enough. We found those sequences hard to watch. They show how the loss of factory work can threaten the place someone lives, and the film is right to give that consequence time. The local efforts to make a living, including rabbit farming, also bring the subject down to the practical business of finding money when the usual work has gone.
Editors Jennifer Beman White and Wendey Stanzler keep the pursuit moving while repeatedly bringing us back to Flint. The contrast between the chairman’s distance and the residents’ immediate difficulties supplies much of the comedy. Those changes of subject also prevent the film from settling into a succession of interviews about decline. The humour makes it easier to stay with painful material, although the speed of a well-timed cut can leave little room to think about whom we have just laughed at.
That is the qualification we would attach to the film’s humour. When local survival measures become comic material, the person struggling can end up seeming ridiculous alongside the circumstances that put them there. Michael Moore’s anger at the company is clear, but it does not make every laugh at an ordinary resident fair. The people facing these difficulties are interesting enough without having to provide another example of how absurd the town’s predicament has become.
Campaigning documentaries still have to explain how things happen. Here, the pursuit of Roger B. Smith gives the story a recognisable opponent, but it offers only a limited account of how corporate decisions are made. More explanation would have helped without turning the film into a lecture or weakening the residents’ stories. An interview with the chairman could never explain everything that has happened to Flint.
At 91 minutes, the film has the good sense not to keep restating its anger until we stop listening. Its residents remain more absorbing than the prospect of a confrontation with the chairman. Give it an evening if political documentaries are your sort of thing, but expect to question some of the jokes.
