Grabbing hold of
the boss
Roger and Me Film directed by Michael Moore. Review by Piers Mostyn. As a one and a half hour documentary on the impact of mass unemployment on a midWest American motor town, at first sight Roger and Me' would not be the average lefty's first choice for a Saturday night out at the movies. Hardly the escapism you're looking for to get away from rows at anti-Poll Tax meetings or the grind of the GMC.
Not so. That a such a film fills cinemas in London's West End and is being well received, speaks for itself.
It's good entertainment that manages to be political at the same time as very funny. Like Atomic Cafe, without the cartoons, it takes a chunk of the great American dream and satirises it ruthlessly by exposing the reality undemeath. Warts and all.
Director and main star Michael Moore goes back to his home town of Flint to find that 30,000 jobs are being shed by General Motors because cheaper labour is available elsewhere.
Moore juxtaposes the naive idealism of the town's golden age - when auto production by GM was everything the community stood for - to the rapid collapse of the myth. Archive footage of streets thronging with annual pageants and parades is set against miles of derelict houses and wrecked cars. In the midst of
REVIEWS all this Moore pursues GM Managing Director, 'Roger" Smith, asking him to come to Flint and meet the victims of his chase for profits.
Much of the film takes the form of a spoof on the Roger Cook brand of TV investigative journalism. But it also follows Flint's hapless inhabitants as they are evicted for non-payment of rent or try to make ends meet -often with absurd results.
That Moore makes such a depressing subject so funny is partly because he raises laughs at their expense. The redundant workers are presented very much as victims. The only portrayal of any resistance to this onslaught is some anger shown by GM workers when the closures are announced and by one in particular who castigates the union bureaucracy for its refusal to fight.
But Moore is also portraying the bizarre nature of provincial USA where there a low premium on trade unionism and a high premium on kitsch.
There are attempts to generate hope through a series of wacky official job-creation enterprises. The only one that makes any sense is the big new prison, built to cope with the surge in crime stemming, from the town's economic devastation.
As an attack on the ethos and policies of capitalism run riot, the film is a timely reminder - given events in Eastern Europe and the crisis of Thatcherism in this country - that it wasn't only Stalinism that was discredited in the 1980s.