Michael & Roger & Phil & Flint

By RICHARD CORLISS

Michael Moore doesn't look like a movie star. With his pinched face, his Pillsbury Doughboy silhouette and his air of befuddled skepticism, he looks as if he'd be lucky to land a night manager's job at a 7-Eleven. Moore might even pass for what he is: the novice director of a documentary film about blue- collar unemployment. So why did 2,000 folks stand in line for hours last week in Flint, Mich., to ask him questions, throw verbal brickbats or cheer him on? Why has his movie Roger & Me stoked debate that has spilled from the entertainment pages into the news columns? And why is General Motors -- still the world's largest industrial corporation -- so darned annoyed by a gadfly like Moore?

Roger & Me, Moore's puckish chronicle of the impact of GM plant closings on the people of Flint, has provoked raves and outrages at film festivals, in movie theaters and especially in the city where it was filmed. Last week, when Moore was the guest on Phil Donahue's talk show, Whiting Auditorium was packed with every species of Flint citizen except GM executives; they were busy warning their ad agencies against placing spots on those Donahue episodes. Slouched in a center-stage chair, Moore got an earful from the audience. Some came to pick nits and fights. Said an audience member: "I'd just like to know what Michael Moore's going to do with all his money, now that he made Flint look bad." But many were fans. "I'm tired of those Hollywood fern-bar types trying to condemn Mike," one man declared. "Good luck, Mike."

The ruckus has achieved what Moore wanted: to stoke debate on the sins of corporate America and to sell tickets to his movie. Roger & Me proves that with a lot of talent and a bit of righteous self-promotion, you can be a town scourge and a local hero. You can also become a former member of the working poor. Moore made his film for a pinchpenny $260,000 and sold it to Warner Bros. for $3 million. What's bad for General Motors is good for Michael Moore.

But what's so bad -- or good -- about Roger & Me? The film traces Moore's attempts to meet Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors. Moore's idea is to show Smith the sagging economy and spirit of Flint, a company town ailing from thousands of GM pink slips. Between fruitless visits to Smith's offices, Moore chats with Flint's elite (seen spending a fun, fund-raising night at the city jail) and homegrown celebrities (like game-show host Bob Eubanks, who tells a joke that manages to be anti-gay and anti-Jewish). He follows the rounds of a county employee evicting delinquent tenants; he talks with a woman who raises rabbits for pets and table meat. Strewn through the film are news clips that dramatize the city's plight.

At once chirpy and cynical, Roger & Me is the rare documentary film that doesn't make viewers feel they are being force-fed a civics lesson. But perhaps the movie is no documentary. Its tone, which tempers populist anger with deadpan facetiousness, is heard in much modern comedy -- sort of Laid Off with David Letterman. Moore classifies the film as "a dark comedy, social satire, 'mockumentary.' "

What troubles some moviegoers is that Moore seems to be mocking his subjects, not just the plutocrats but also the disenfranchised, for the crime of being insufficiently hip. Further, few of these people receive any of the largesse Moore is now reaping. Warner has donated $25,000 to be divided among the four families shown being evicted. Of Moore's cut, $1 million will go to the Center for Alternative Media, "to find films on similar issues and other good works," and $2 million will go to Moore's production company, Dog Eat Dog Films, from which he draws a $35,000 annual salary.

Other reviewers, such as Film Comment's Harlan Jacobson, have pointed out numerous liberties that Moore takes with time and facts. The number of 1986 GM layoffs in Flint, for example, was about 5,000, not the 30,000 implied in the film. The company contends that many employees simply retired or accepted voluntary terminations or transfers to GM jobs elsewhere. Three huge commercial projects, which the city mistakenly hoped would revive prosperity, opened and failed before the 1986 layoffs, though Moore hints that they came partly as a response to GM's cuts. Says Flint Mayor Matthew S. Collier: "Anyone who knows Flint can't help realizing the film is fiction. If this is a documentary, I wonder about all those PBS shows on whales and dolphins."

GM and the United Auto Workers, both of which take their lumps in Roger & Me, are handing out copies of Pauline Kael's scathing New Yorker review of the film. To Moore, who is happy to argue every debatable point in Roger & Me, "these critics see themselves as culture police, telling us what a documentary is. Roger & Me was intended as a movie for people to go to on a Friday night. It's not an NBC White Paper, not an episode of Nova. To the guardians of the documentary, I apologize that the picture is entertaining."

Which is precisely, of course, why a big studio like Warner bought the film. "They're in the trend business; they have to be tuned in," says Moore. "Millions of working Americans are fed up with ten years of Reagan and Bush. People want to see a movie that speaks to that concern and need." In addition, the movie industry may have bought itself an eccentric superstar. Wouldn't it be funny if it took GM's most nettlesome antagonist since Ralph Nader to lead Hollywood to the heartbeat of America?

With reporting by Gavin Scott/Flint and Joe Szczesny/Detroit