Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Roger & Me Blu-ray Movie Review

The Man from Flint

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 7, 2014

Michael Moore has acquired many fans, probably even more enemies and an Oscar for Best Documentary (for Bowling for Columbine) in the twenty-five years since his first film, Roger & Me, but it may turn out that the freshman effort will stand as his finest achievement. Deep study, thorough investigation and careful analysis have never been Moore's strong suits, which is why his documentaries have so often been more effective as provocations than as aids to understanding. His principal contribution to the documentary form has been to make it entertaining—a goal he freely acknowledges in the commentary newly recorded for this Blu-ray edition of Roger & Me. With a showman's panache and a satirist's mean streak, Moore can always be counted on to hold an audience's attention, even if that means they're howling at the screen.

In Roger & Me, though, Moore didn't need to investigate his subject, because he already knew it intimately. The film is a portrait of Moore's home town, Flint, Michigan, as it rapidly deteriorated from the prosperous middle class community of Moore's youth into a poverty-stricken wasteland after General Motors closed down the auto factories that had been the town's life blood. Determined to show people the enormity of the economic havoc, Moore taught himself, by trial and error, to operate a 16mm camera, shooting many cans of unusable film in the process. Although Moore had reporting experience as a print journalist, all of his previous work was for alternative press, including a brief stint with Mother Jones, who fired him for being too working class. His severance helped fund Roger & Me.

One can argue, as does a GM spokesperson in the film, that GM's actions were reasonable business decisions. Still, a quarter century later, it's hard to dispute Moore's instinct that, in the words of the famous Sixties song, "there's somethin' happenin' here". Despite the tech-fueled growth of the Nineties and the many new possibilities presented by the internet, the fate of Flint has been repeated in many other U.S. communities, including nearby Detroit. Though the causes are more complex than plant closings, the replacement of good-paying jobs with low-wage or part-time work, and the negative consequences that follow, have become a permanent topic of national conversation. Roger & Me helped start that conversation in terms that are worth revisiting.

The narrative thread of Roger & Me, which Moore admits in the new commentary was mostly a device, is Moore's three-year quest to get an appointment with the then-chairman of GM, Roger B. Smith, to ask him about the plant closings in Flint and possibly persuade him to visit the city to witness firsthand the impact of all those lost jobs. Moore says now that he naively imagined he might eventually meet with Smith, but some of the film's most comical moments show Moore repeatedly being turned away from GM's offices, from clubs to which Smith belongs and from GM properties in general, as word of his filmmaking activities spread throughout the organization.

The core of Roger & Me, however, is Moore's portrait of Flint's rapid transformation as the plants close and the vibrant town of his youth (remembered, no doubt, through rose-tinted glasses and portrayed in vintage film, newsreel and TV clips) rapidly disintegrates. Without customers who can afford to spend money, local shops are shuttered. Eviction becomes a full-time business for Deputy Fred Ross, one of the film's most memorable personalities, as tenants can no longer pay their rent. Crime rates soar to the point that, when ABC's Nightline schedules a live report on conditions in Flint, the story is never shown, because their satellite broadcasting truck is stolen. The inmate population swells so rapidly that a new prison has to be built. A few of the laid-off workers find new work as guards, while others try the fast-food industry, where a lot of them get fired, because their skills don't adapt well.

The city authorities try increasingly desperate measures to put a good face on the situation, with parades, visits from local celebrities, and expensive investments that attempt to transform Flint into a tourist destination—all to no avail. (If you've ever spent time in the Detroit area, you will understand that the notion of spending money to make Flint a tourist attraction is the equivalent of betting your mortgage payment on a longshot at the track.) Meanwhile, people who are still doing well in this economy throw parties and are willing to tell Moore's camera that everything is fine and opportunity remains plentiful. As noted by former GM endorser Pat Boone, without a hint of irony, it's no accident that Amway got its start in the State of Michigan.

Lurking at the core of Roger & Me is an interesting economic and social question that has become only more pointed in the years since the film appeared. GM spokesman Tom Kay, to whom Moore returns regularly throughout the film, frames the issue most directly during the closing credits: "Well, if you're espousing a philosophy, which apparently you are, that the corporation owes employees cradle-to-the-grave security, I don't think that can be accomplished under a free enterprise system." While Kay's "cradle-to-the-grave" rhetoric is extreme, Roger & Me is driven by the belief, to which Moore would return in Capitalism: A Love Story, that companies do better in the long run when their employees also thrive instead of being treated like entries in a ledger. The ultimate justification for the GM plant closings was to maximize the company's value. But how does one measure value, and over what term? (We all know how GM did in the following decades.)

Then again, the issue may depend on what kind of company you're talking about. Twenty-five years after Roger & Me, it is possible to view the events depicted in the film as part of a larger trend in which the engine of the U.S. economy shifted from manufacturing to financial services. Say what you will about the latter, but it's not a business that has ever needed to care about its employees' well-being in order to do well.

Roger & Me Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

According to a statement released by Moore in his e-newsletter, Warner has given Roger & Me a 4k restoration from the original 16mm negative. This overhaul was necessitated by the discovery, several years ago, that all of the existing prints had so badly deteriorated that a new source would have to be created for the limited theatrical re-release planned for this fall (which will no doubt be a DCP). The result of this remastering, presented on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, demonstrates yet again that 16mm film can, when properly handled, yield a detailed and film-like image with visible but well-rendered grain and a vivid array of colors that can now be more precisely timed than ever.

While the archival TV broadcasts, newsreels and film clips will never look better than their sources, Moore's own footage (shot by himself and several different cameramen) captures everything from the pageantry of the annual Flint parade to the desolation of derelict factories and abandoned neighborhoods with impressive detail. It also catches the uniquely human interactions with local Flint residents, as well as the various functionaries who interpose themselves between Moore and his efforts to ambush Roger Smith. And then there are the unforgettable characters like Deputy Fred and Rabbit Lady Rhonda, whose vivid personalities are matched by the clarity of their images.

As Moore repeatedly notes in his commentary, none of his footage was "professional", and a lot of what he used was included simply because that day's footage turned out well instead of being ruined by some rookie mistake. Still, Warner has done a superb job of capturing the raw, you-are-there feel of a documentary while preserving the director's goal of presenting the film as entertainment. For all the limitations of the source, the image is still a pleasure to watch, especially when Moore catches celebrities like Bob Eubanks (of The Dating Game) in informal moments of conversation.

With vivid colors, decent blacks and impressive detail (when the lighting permits), the Blu-ray image is also free of any noticeable high-frequency roll-off, artificial sharpening or other inappropriate digital tampering. The average bitrate clocks in at 23.94, which doesn't seem inappropriate for a film that includes a fair number of talking-head interview sequences. I expect that some posters in the Blu-ray forum will question the high video score given to this title, but it is for the accuracy of the presentation, not its value as eye candy.

Roger & Me Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Roger & Me was released in mono, and the Blu-ray also features a mono soundtrack encoded as Dolby Digital 2.0, with identical left and right channels. The use of DD instead of a lossless format is a noteworthy departure for Warner, which has been providing lossless audio on its Blu-rays for many years now, including on classic titles from the vault, where the argument could be made (and has been by other studios) that the dynamic range of older soundtracks is too limited for lossless audio to make an audible difference. I can't explain (and wouldn't try) why Warner went this route with Roger & Me, but I can report that the audio sounds decent enough, clearly reproducing Moore's voiceover narration, the voices of the interviewees and bystanders and the musical selections that are often deliberately recorded as if played through an old AM radio or TV speaker. Perhaps the biggest victim of the lossy audio is the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice", which plays both during the film and over the closing credits and would almost certainly have a fuller sound in a better audio format than DD at 192 kbps. (The song acquires an ironic import in the film due to its association with the nervous breakdown of an auto worker.)

It should be noted that the omission of lossless audio has nothing to do with space concerns. Several GB of the BD-25 remain unused.

Roger & Me Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Warner released Roger & Me on DVD in 2003 with commentary and a trailer. The Blu-ray includes the trailer and an all-new commentary recorded for the film's twenty-fifth anniversary.

• Commentary with Director Michael Moore: Moore's new commentary is infused with a sense of everything that has happened in the twenty-five years since Roger & Me appeared—a subject on which he comments frequently—but he apparently hasn't forgotten his first experience making a film, as he repeatedly describes his unfamiliarity with the most basic technical aspects of shooting a movie and the many friends and acquaintances who helped him learn. He also recalls numerous details about individual interview subjects, including the famous "pets or meat" seller of rabbits, whose scenes, Moore points out, upset viewers more than the one depicting victims of violent crime. Overall, it's a lively and informative commentary, except for those who can't stand Michael Moore, but they aren't likely to acquire this disc in the first place.



• Trailer (480i; 1.33:1; 2:33): Narrated by Moore, the trailer uses review quotes emphasizing the film's humor.

Roger & Me Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are many people for whom the very name Michael Moore is anathema, but I doubt that any of them are reading this review. At the opposite extreme are Moore's devoted fans, who hardly need a reviewer's recommendation to acquire this presentation of Roger & Me in the best home video format to date. Somewhere in the middle are people with mixed feelings, of whom I'm one. Moore's passion is admirable, and his flair as an entertainer is undeniable. No one, not even Errol Morris, has done more to move the documentary format into the mainstream by making it fun to watch and removing its stigma as something vaguely medicinal. The question remains, though, whether Moore's popularization of documentaries has really been a good thing, since, especially in his later films, he's done it by making himself as much a star of the show as the subject he's supposed to be investigating. If you want to see the Michael Moore show, you can watch Capitalism: A Love Story, but if you want to understand the 2008 financial crisis, you should watch Inside Job, whose director never appears on screen and whose name (Charles Ferguson) most people wouldn't recognize.

But Roger & Me is different. In Roger & Me the familiar Moore persona hadn't fully developed, and there was still enough of the reporter left in Moore to fulfill the traditional documentarian's role. Besides, he already knew his subject inside and out. This was his home. Despite the lack of lossless audio, highly recommended.