Big One, The (1997)

reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten


THE BIG ONE
 Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
 Miramax Films/Dog-Eat-Dog Films
 Director:  Michael More
 Writer: Michael Moore
 Cast: Michael Moore, Garrison Keillor, Studs Terkel, Rick
Nelson, Phil Knight

What would Michael Moore say about the New York Times article of 2/10/98, which questions the usual (liberal) view of downsizing? Says America's most prestigious daily newspaper, "Month after month the Labor Department reports the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. 358,000 were added in January....well-paid middle managers and other upper-level office workers are being hired in big numbers....The study challenges views about the work force. One is that corporate downsizing has decimated middle-level management...but hiring has outpaced the layoffs...Corporate America is starved for people highly skilled in technology."

No problem for Moore. The workers with whom he sympathizes and emphathizes do not have the options of the mroe mobile and educated unemployed. One of the few filmmakers who can make a hilarious documentary about a serious subject, Moore is firmly on the side of Middle Americans who have lived all their lives in their towns, areas like Flint, Cincinnati, and Centralia. They take pride in their generally routine jobs, and have been despondent since receiving pink slips through no fault of their own. These are the real Americans, those with firm roots in their abodes, who are not the sorts who can simply pick up and travel halfway around the country to where the jobs are. Why have they been fired or, as the current expression would have it, downsized? Simply because their companies wanted to make more profit by locating their plants in underdeveloped countries like Mexico and Indonesia. What's wrong with trying to maximize profit in this way? Nothing, if you're a high corporate executive who believes that this is your sole purpose. Plenty if you're Michael Moore, who believes that if a company is MAKING HUGE PROFITS, it has a RESPONSIBILITY to share some of this wealth with its American employees.

Michael Moore is well known among movie buffs as the writer-director of one of the most celebrated documentaries, "Roger and Me," a droll tale of his crusade to meet with Roger Smith, Chairman of General Motors, to discuss with him the decision to close the GM factories in Moore's home town of Flint, Michigan. As shown by that film and his current one, Moore's talent extends beyond his ability to write a whimsical script and even his talent at the helm of his films. Most important he is a stand-up comic of the first order, one who wears his heart on his sleeve and whose sincerity is obvious to any sensitive person watching him at work in his favorite role of gadfly to the Establishment.

The title of his current movie, "The Big One" refers not to President Clinton (or any aspect of the chief executive) but to the country as a whole. Among his many opinions is that the name "The United States of America" is a dull one, certainly when compared to, say, "The United Kingdom" or "Great Britain," and that our nation should more accurately be called "The Big One." His focus is the downsizing trend which has become stylish in corporate America, and, in fact he even wrote the number one best-seller "Downsize This!" He puts across his views in the most entertaining way imaginable, traveling about the mid-west interviewing workers and executive alike, performing stand-up comedy to appreciative crowds everywhere, and throwing in asides when the mood strikes. The result is a kaleidoscopic look at a national affliction: the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of loyal employees simply because the big bosses can get the jobs done outside the country at one-tenth the labor costs.

Among the asides which can disarm even the grouchiest of audiences, he describes to an appreciative crowd of college youngsters that during the presidential campaign of '96 he conducted an experiment to test the greed of the candidates. He set up some dummy corporations which issued small checks to the aspirants, in one case mailing $100 to Pat Buchanan's campaign from "Abortionists for Buchanan." The right-wing journalist cashed the check. When Moore's book "Downsize This!" came out, Random House, his publisher, sent him on a marketing tour which the documentary filmmaker turned into this splendid, heartfelt and very funny documentary about the effects of the policy of downsizing.

Thrown out by security guards and publicists for some major corporations for entering their buildings with his small army of camera people, he is enthusiastically received by downsized workers everywhere. At a Payday factory in Centralia Illinois, he commiserates with packers who have spent five, ten, twenty years with the company and are now tossed out because they were too productive! The plants relocated to Mexico. Once, whenever a company spokesperson cited for the umpteenth time the need to maximize profits, Moore retorts, "Then why doesn't General Motors sell crack?" Moore explores one situation in which prison labor is used by TWA to book reservations, because the incarcerated could be paid just two dollars an hour. His most intriguing interview is with Phil Knight, the hip-looking CEO of Nike corporation, which makes America's most popular and profited athletic shoes. The trouble is that none of these shoes (save one) are made in the U.S. The assemblers are workers as young as fourteen in Indonesia, whose laborers cannot even afford shoes for themselves and where they are paid twenty cents an hour. (Michael Jordan receives $20 million annually from the corporation, more than the entire 30,000 strong labor force in Indonesia.) Remarkably, Knight wants Moore to believe that "Americans do not want to make shoes." When Moore proves the chief executive wrong by showing him documentary footage, the latter retorts that the unemployed are desperate and will say anything--but cannot be trusted to stick to the job for long.

Technically, the movie is messy, which is understandable given the need to transport cameras to various locations in a flash and, in some cases to hide them from the people being filmed. It's difficult to leave this work without feeling a strong support for unions, for labor in general. Moore certainly realizes that to put across points most efficiently, you've got to keep the audience laughing. "The Big One" should be required viewing for members of the working class who blithely cross picket lines, lines of people who, like them, are struggling on $5, $6 or $8 an hour. The movie is an education in class-consciousness which can be enjoyed even by those without a political thought in their heads. Not rated. Running time: 96 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998


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