Roger and Me

In the documentary Roger and Me, controversial director Michael Moore takes a look at the layoffs that have taken place in his home town of Flint, Michigan, by the General Motors car company. It is his goal through this documentary to get Roger Smith, the president of GM, to come to Flint to see how these layoffs caused many families to be forced to relocate, been evicted, and contributed to the rise in of crime in Flint. He takes a very comical approach as he tries to track down Roger at several high class locations. This documentary, on whole, does a great job of telling the story of a town that has fallen on extremely hard times, while keeping the audience engaged. This documentary is essential to the genre of documentaries because it was one of the first participatory documentaries that were able to bring comedy to a sore subject matter. I think he was able to pave the way for Morgan Spurlock and other participatory documentarians.

In my opinion, the strongest aspect of this documentary is Michael’s approach. Like most of his documentaries, this is a very participatory film. Moore knows that he is the subject and he uses his views on subjects to make the best possible interviews and conversations that he can. He does a great job of approaching the documentary as an idea to get Roger to come with him and spend a day in Flint, knowing that the chances of him coming to Flint will most likely not happen. Using that as his outline Moore does a great job of getting interviews with very interesting people and capturing a city that has become a ruin of what it once was. The locations that he picked were also very interesting and he must have put a good amount of thought into where he would go to find Roger. I enjoyed the time he went to one of Roger’s hangouts and the people were shown as very rich and sophisticated.

One aspect I would say that I did not really enjoy was how he jumped from different places and people with very little continuity. I enjoyed the part with the beauty pageant, however did not feel that it was in the right place and felt it did not add very much to the subject matter, other than this person really comes off as not to bright. This goes into how ethical this documentary was and I could easily see how someone could start controversy over it. Again, using the beauty queen as an example, she may be very bright off camera and Moore could have easily painted her as the not so bright queen. I also thought it was a little unethical that Moore would film the family being kicked out of their home over Christmas.