For the little that is heard these days about the town of Flint, Michigan, it could almost have ceased to exist, and if I didn't have friends who have family there, I might think so too. Michael Moore wants to make sure none of us forget Flint, his hometown, or what happened there.
Flint, the once the booming town of steel and home of automobile production factories and General Motors plants, (GM, one of the richest companies in the world), Flint, for all intents and purposes has since turned into a ghost-town. Who better to tell us the devolution of Flint than hometown boy and documentary producer Michael Moore, who in his film, Roger and Me, sets out to find General Motors Chairman Roger Smith and to sit down with the man and ask him how he feels about what happened to Flint and the workers who live there after Smith laid off 30,000 workers, and after that, closed plant after plant as he sent increasingly more work to Mexico where he could get away with paying workers, according to Moore, as little as seven cents an hour. So begins Moore's search for Roger Smith - as he follows "a trail of three-martini lunches all across America."
There's no question that Moore can be persistent and opinionated to the point where he almost loses any favor his original argument of point of view may have had. That Moore often takes comments out of context and is nothing short of masterful at combining clips and pull quotes to create the effect that he wants (and thus lead you to seeing things his way), none of this should come as a surprise. After all, in one way or another, isn't that what film-makers everywhere do? Any film, any documentary, and any news report, regardless of what we're told, inevitably has some bias. The true objective story is a rara avis, and I wonder if it's even as interesting as the one with the slant anyway. Maybe I want the slant. Maybe I want the point of view of a guy who grew up in Flint because he seems to care a bit more than I do and by God, if it were my home town, I'd probably feel the same sense of outrage and melancholy that Moore captures in Roger and Me so incredibly well.
It may just be that Moore is a little less reticent about hiding that bias, and in that way, there's something likable about him. Boo all you want, but Moore is cheering for the working man in a time when few seem to bother. The consensus seems to be, if it's not my hometown, why should I give a shit. Give a shit because it could easily be your home town and just might be tomorrow - those are the watchwords that underlie Moore's message.
Article comments
1 - audrey
wow- what a great perspective. from a former city of flint employee who's moved on to a better place, thanks.