The Talkies/Ego Trips

...On the contrary, as the film never acknowledges, he's a notorious figure in Flint...

...Like McElwee, incidentally, Moore managed to get his hands on government money: Roger and Me was partly funded by the Michigan Council on the Arts...

...Yes, Moore does mention his past editorship of the Flint Voice (the local equivalent to New York's Village Voice...

...Branagh appears, in short, to see Shakespeare less as drama than as an occasion for dazzling solo turns...

...Indeed, the only person not laughing, in the Manhattan theater where I saw the picture, seemed to be my friend from Flint...

...This might explain why, despite his severe abridgment of Shakespeare's text, he has chosen to interpolate several dramatically extraneous scenes from the Henry IV plays, all of them featuring Henry's highly colorful erstwhile friend, Sir John Falstaff (Robbie Coltrane), who doesn't appear anywhere in the pre-Branagh text of Henry V Branagh's relative indifference to dramatic requirements might also explain his failure—which has been noted by many critics—to account for the victory at Agincourt of the drastically outnumbered English...

...Meet Kenneth 13ranagh, the 30-year-old director, star, and adapter of the brand-new, slimmed-down screen version of Henry V. The homely Branagh, who has in recent years won himself a reputation as the reigning boy wonder of the British stage, proves to be a commanding actor and a fluent director...

...The film's sense of period, moreover, is harmed by Branagh's prissy coiffure, which (thanks to his many lingering close-ups of himself) we find ourselves staring at again and again...

...The film's sense of period is also violated—and in far more injurious fashion—by its musical score...

...But it also has the overall feel of a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, or even—leaping, as it does, from Big Scene to Big Scene, with all the Dull Parts neatly excised—of a long, long trailer...

...But most of all, the score is mind-bogglingly terrible—hackneyed, vulgar, and (in its aggressive, penny-ante pseudo-romanticism) flagrantly anachronistic...

...By the time the UAW's power waned, it was too late for Flint...

...He tells us, too, about the editorial job he held briefly in San Francisco, from which he was fired for (he implies) being too much of a renegade...

...There is, to be sure, much to admire here: the sense of period, which is for the most part meticulous (in the age of Joe Papp, of course, one is grateful for any Shakespeare production that does not feature helicopters or nineteenth-century German military uniforms...

...and "Gee, why's he speaking in iambic pentameter...

...Even the majestic "Non nobis domine," which is sung by an apparently mixed chorus (another anachronism) over an extensive tracking shot of Henry trudging across the corpse-strewn Agincourt battlefield, is badly handled...

...It's a beautifully shaped film, with a rare sense of story, character, and place (and an entirely appropriate musical score by Maurice Jarre...

...Likewise, Moore habitually implies cause-and-effect connections that may or may not actually obtain: my Flint friend asserted, for instance, that the deterioration of Flint's downtown had less to do with GM's pullout than with the opening of a new shopping center—the Genesee Valley Mall—on the outskirts of town...

...Flint didn't need this," he said, shaking his head, as we left...

...Yes, when the speeches are over the soldiers behave as if somebody's lit a fire under them, and proceed to fight heroically...

...Certainly, if the audience with which I saw Roger and Me is any indication, Moore is winning the yuppie crowd over with his comedy—which is no wonder, for his sense of humor is as mean-spirited and condescending as David Letterman's...

...and just as McElwee (an egomaniac in hapless schmo's clothing) put himself at the center of his film, so Moore has made himself the hero of Roger and Me...

...A favorite conceit throughout the film is that some visiting celebrity—Pat Boone, Anita Bryant, Bob Eubanks, Miss Michigan—has come to "save" Flint...

...it's so overdone—the chorus would seem to be of Mormon Tabernacle Choir proportions, and the anthem too elaborately arranged—that it all but overwhelms the on-screen action...

...We're supposed to laugh at the foolish answers they give to his questions about the poor, supposed to see them as heartless for golfing when people are being thrown out of their homes...

...He's become just as famous, in fact, as his nemesis Roger Smith, longtime chairman of General Motors and the Roger of Moore's title, who helped send Flint's economy into a tailspin, a few years back, when he and his board began closing plants there and opening new ones in Mexico...

...yet when Branagh cuts to the faces of his listeners at Harfleur or Agincourt, the tattered extras don't seem to have been told how to react: the expressions on their faces seem to be saying, variously, "What an actor...

...to put things a bit differently, Moore makes his viewers feel sensitive to the problems of Flint even as he panders to their insensitivity...

...at times, indeed, you'd think the sappy, schlocky music had been borrowed from one of those panoramic, surround-screen movies of the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, and so forth that they show at Disneyland...

...I've never known bad music (and good music, badly employed) to damage a major film as extensively as it has this one, and it's simply a sign, I think, of rampant rock-era tone-deafness that the so-called educated public has applauded Henry V without so much as noticing how awful and unsuitable its score is...

...the consistent matter-of-factness with which it contemplates Herman's increasingly outrageous situation is perfect, as is its scrupulously sustained balance of gentleness and irony...

...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990...

...There's no question but that Roger Smith made decisions that hurt Flint, and the worst of all—in the view of a friend of mine from Flint who attended the movie with me—wasn't even mentioned in the film: an entire residential neighborhood was razed so GM could build a plant it soon abandoned...

...Patently, he doesn't want to deal with complicated truths, especially those that might weaken his case against GM...

...Needless to say, Moore's attack on corporate callousness is profoundly THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 29 disingenuous: he, of all people, knows how business operates...

...his film moves quite smoothly, and (despite his apparent attempt to counter the pageantry of Olivier's 1945 film with explicit scenes of battlefield carnage) has some magnificent sequences...

...over in England, they do Shakespeare...

...just as McElwee made a running gag of his nominal interest in General Sherman, so Moore has made a running gag of his less-than-serious attempt to wangle an interview with Roger Smith...

...but one misses a sense of vital connection between them and their king...

...what he fails to tell us is that the job was with the far-left Mother Jones, whose editors reportedly found him too radical even for them...

...at another point, when Henry declares "We are in God's hand," it begins to rain immediately...

...Shorn of this political history, however, and disguised as a CapraBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...And he jeers endlessly at the bourgeoisie, cutting (in a typical sequence) from a scene in which a poor Flint family is being evicted for nonpayment of rent to a scene in which he interviews some elderly lady golfers at a local course...

...Thus, he describes GM repeatedly as "the richest company in the world"—as if there were at its disposal an unlimited supply of funds that it could (if so inclined) dole out to Flint's poor for ever and ever—but he never mentions the precipitous decline in the company's market share during the seventies and eighties...

...But it's Moore who's heartless, ambushing seemingly decent folks, implicitly indicting them as co-conspirators with GM simply because they can afford to golf, and editing his footage in such a way as to make even their modest pleasures seem brutally insensitive...

...Of course GM went to Mexico: thanks to the UAW, it couldn't afforrl to have cars made in Flint anymore...

...Moore interviews each of these celebrities, and we are invited to laugh at their ignorance of Flint's economic problems (as if we were all that familiar with them an hour earlier...

...Paul Scofield's grand performance as the French king...

...What a time to make a speech...

...Like Letterman, too, Moore gets a lot of mileage out of ridiculing vapid showbiz figures...

...I t's New York in 1949, and Herman Broder .(Ron Silver), a struggling young Jewish immigrant ghostwriter for a rich rabbi (Alan King), has a bizarre domestic crisis: having shuttled regularly, for some time, between his simple, devoted second wife, Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), the Polish Catholic house servant who saved him from the Nazis and with whom he lives in Coney Island, and his beautiful, lusty Jewish mistress, Masha (Lena Olin), a fellow Holocaust survivor with whom he shares a flat in the Bronx and who is pressuring him to marry her, he suddenly finds himself confronted with Tamara (Anjelica Huston), his shrewd, sardonic first wife, whom he believed dead in the war but who has now come to live on the Lower East Side and work in a religious-articles store...

...What to do...

...and throughout the movie, the abrupt appearances, whether in a castle or on a battlefield, of the film's one-man chorus (Derek Jacobi) in twentieth-century garb bring to mind the similarly clad roving narrator of Monty Python and the Holy Grail...

...Henry's Big Speeches, after all, are intended not just as histrionics but as calls to action...

...His ego trip of a film has become a success not because it sheds light on a significant and complex predicament (it doesn't), but because it entertains its audience—at the expense of an unfortunate city and its residents —while allowing it to feel both virtuous and superior...

...Just as McElwee (a Georgian) squeezed easy laughs out of the Southern commonfolk on whom he trained his camera, so Moore has gotten comedy mileage out of Flint locals...

...esque Everyman whose lifelong trust in corporate paternalism has been shaken to its roots by Roger Smith's perfidy, Moore is not too radical for anybody...

...Yet at times the film strays dangerously close to Monty Python territory...

...March...

...Or perhaps it should more properly be compared to one of those videotapes that actors put together to showcase their talents for casting agents: for the fact is that Branagh's camera concentrates so intensely on Branagh that the drama, as such, suffers...

...and at their simpleminded instant optimism about the city's economy, an optimism which contrasts sharply with the scenes of boarded-up houses and abandoned auto plants that Moore has been showing us...

...But Moore's attention to these celebs gives new meaning to the phrase "easy target...

...what he fails to tell us is what a high-profile editor he was, renowned for his leftist zealotry and tireless self-aggrandizement...

...He's a man whose very ordinariness and lack of imagination have helped to steer him into extraordinarily profane circumstances—who, paradoxically, ends up a trigamist less because of his temerity than because of his timidity, less through lewdness than through a misguided sense of decency...

...Watching her bring Tamara to life, one wonders if Meryl Streep could have played the role half as well...

...M ore than once while watching Roger and Me, I was reminded of Ross McElwee and his documentary Sherman's...

...painstakingly contrasted with him throughout is Moore, who depicts himself as an earnest, hapless little schmo, the David to Roger's Goliath (and the proud son of a sometime GM worker), who wants nothing more than to speak to Roger and bring him to Flint, where GM was founded, so that Roger can see the harm he's caused and take action to restore prosperity...

...Wherever it intrudes, the sense of period that the other elements of the film have striven for so mightily is completely vanquished...

...Time and again, Moore invites us to laugh at poor folks because they're still benighted enough to believe that The System will save them...

...and the funny, charming, and marvelously natural scenes involving the princess Katherine (Emma Thompson...

...Moore's film portrays Smith as a distant, impassive, and amorally calculating CEO...

...During the Agincourt sequence, for instance, Branagh cuts at least three times to what looks like the very same shot of a sky ludicrously crowded with arrows...

...Moore is, however, no camera-toting Common Man...

...And while all the actors are fine, Miss Huston's wise, droll, and thoroughly authentic performance is a standout...

...And didn't we tire of laughing at Pat Boone and Anita Bryant years ago...

...No, but Michael Moore did...

...What really ruined Flint," my friend said after the movie, "was that the UAW got too strong and made increasingly ridiculous demands on an industry that was losing ground to the Japanese...

...For one thing, it's often much too loud: more than once, when Branagh or some other actor is shouting out the climactic lines of a speech, one has the impression that he is doing so in order to be heard over the orchestra...

...Based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer (which was published in English in 1972) and directed by Paul Mazursky from a script he wrote with Roger L. Simon, Enemies A Love Story is the hugely entertaining, richly human tale of a schlemiel who is as irresponsible as he is indecisive and of the three remarkable women with whom he rides the Wonder Wheel of life...

...These are points that Moore allows no one to make in his film...

...I say lucky because Moore has now, with his documentary Roger and Me, become famous off his hometown's misfortunes...

...One is reminded of the self-consciously theatrical first-act fmale of Reds, with its triple-fortissimo deployment of the "Internationale...

...the surgical precision and seeming effortlessness with which she delineates this complex, singular woman are breathtaking...

...I n America, when egocentric would- ". be auteurs want to be famous, they make pugnacious documentaries...

...But there are aspects to the situation that Moore deliberately ignores...

...He's the very definition of an operator: Roger and Me exploits Flint as surely as GM ever did, and Moore is certainly as arrogant as any CEO...