Imposing On Reality

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ROGER & ME Directed and Written by Michael Moore

Michael Moore is a funny man -- and also an angry one. But when you've seen this movie, you have to wonder: Is he entirely honest? One hates to raise this question, since anyone who is willing to run bingo games to help finance his movie has the makings of a folk hero. Especially when his completed picture becomes the talk of the film-festival circuit and achieves what few documentaries ever do: distribution by a major studio, which is said to have paid $2 million for the privilege.

The metaphor through which Moore explores several serious social, political and economic issues is his hometown, Flint, Mich., a boom-and-bust factory community that hit bottom again in the mid-'80s, when its principal employer, General Motors, began a series of layoffs that, according to Moore, eventually cost the city some 35,000 jobs. This created a ripple effect afflicting, it would seem, almost every other business, almost every citizen.

The Roger of the title is Roger Smith, GM's chairman, and the central conceit of the film is Moore's desire to take Smith on a tour of Flint to show him the havoc he has wrought. To this end, Moore and his film crew stalk Smith, showing up and asking to see him at GM headquarters, at the Detroit Athletic Club and at another club, where Smith is not even a member. This leads to a number of funny-edgy encounters with puzzled receptionists and security personnel. At one point Moore flashes a Chuck E. Cheese card as identification.

The scenes of life in Flint constitute the best part of the movie. Pat Boone and Anita Bryant come through, singing inspirational songs and uttering fatuities for Moore's camera. Game-show host (and Flint native) Bob Eubanks does his weary routine and very possibly kills what is left of a fringe career by telling two disgusting jokes to the inquiring reporter. Kaye Lani Rae Rafko, a Miss Michigan who is soon to be Miss America, flashes false smiles and desperately changes the subject when Moore asks her to comment on local conditions. Meantime, the more substantial citizenry gets behind new construction that is supposed to revitalize Flint -- a Hyatt Regency, a mall, an automobile museum. They all fail.

As a tragicomic essay on the powerlessness of traditional American boosterism in the face of true economic cataclysm, Roger & Me succeeds hilariously -- and sometimes poignantly. But it has a number of bothersome aspects. One is its treatment of the cataclysm itself. GM's layoffs were not as extensive or precipitate as Moore suggests, and many of the failed civic- improvement plans were begun years before the firings. But it may be that Moore's largest untruth involves his own screen persona. He would have us see him as a sort of Rust Belt Garrison Keillor, innocent but natively shrewd.

But wait a minute! Far from being a hick, Moore is an experienced professional journalist who knows perfectly well that getting in to see the chairman of anything without an appointment is virtually impossible. He is thus not simply recording reality but imposing on it a fictional design that proves the predetermined point he wants to make. And that makes the viewer wonder about his smash-and-grab intrusions on other realities throughout the film. It may be that his truth is the truth about his subject. And no doubt he is a smart and cheeky inheritor of the great grumbling populist tradition. Too bad he inherited the demagogic side of that tradition too.