FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| FILM The Big One Michael Moore, director of Roger and Me and most recently, The Big One, is not a deep thinker. He is a painfully obvious thinker, a blunt-object-to-the-frontal-lobe thinker. But when you look for profundities, you discover he is too busy fighting the u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-y stupid contradictions of Corporate America to have the chance to get esoteric. And that is precisely the point why The Big One had to be made. Okay, so here's the critical path analysis of this corporate avenger. Eight years ago, he was working the line at "Generous" Motors in Flint, Michigan when they decided to close the factories. That's it - one day, he's got a job; the next day, he's got the sidewalk. And where is GM's CEO, Roger Smith, while the whole town of Flint plunges into economic chaos? Moore tried to track him down and the result is the 1989 documentary, Roger and Me, the highest grossing, non-concert documentary of all time. Moore found his calling as a director/social advocate and kept his place in the public eye with his Emmy Award-winning TV series, TV Nation, which is part satire/part news magazine/lots of guerrilla video. There is also the comedy (as the Americans call it, Canadians are not quite sure what category it falls into) Canadian Bacon, starring the late John Candy, about an American president who creates a fictional war against Canada. In between, he wrote a book called, Downsize This!: Random Threats From an Unarmed American. While on the book tour, Moore cottoned onto the idea of documenting it on film. "I had already done 20 (of 47) cities on the tour before we decided to start shooting it," Moore explains in a telephone interview from Toronto, the morning after the film's premiere, which resulted in a standing ovation from the audience. "We just did it on a lark. There was no plan and I encountered so many weird things every day." They encountered weird things because as they traveled, they plugged lap-top PCs with modems into the van's cigarette lighters and surfed the Internet to dig up corporate dirt on each town on the list. If you cross Ralph Nader with Pee Wee's Big Adventure, you end up with The Big One - hysterically, pathetically accurate. Moore meets an ex-con who worked for TWA while in prison; he spends an evening trading riffs with Cheap Trick's Rick Neilsen (Moore's greatest unfulfilled wish is to play guitar with a rock band); he goes to the head office of Forbes magazine and discovers that Steve Forbes might not actually be human; he has an on-stage epiphany that if Chrysler were given control of all the crack in America, they could solve the illegal drug trade crisis in five years; and he takes on Phil Knight, the head of Nike. But who is Michael Moore? Does he expect his renegade antics to work? "Ultimately," he says, "this is just a movie, but if everyone does their part, we could have a better world." Is he, as one suit accused him of, profiting from the misfortune of others? "I've never put a gun to somebody's head and forced them to give me eight dollars to watch my movie." Is he for real? His favorite fictional hero is Holden Caulfield, the sensitive non-conformist of Catcher in the Rye; his cherished journey is to drive through the upper peninsula of Michigan; and his greatest extravagance is the reckless way he buys CDs. Is he brave? Does he have a messianic complex? Hard to tell, but it's unlikely. When presented with the situation of walking through a crowded room naked and being able to choose one thing that would give him a sense of power, he selected something sharp to poke everyone's eyes out. That pretty much deletes the inflated-ego option. My guess is that it is the issue which fortifies this man. He is just the vehicle, the voice and the venue. |
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