Guess what? The documentary doesn't bite...

By Ian Blecher

COURTESY MIRAMAX FILMS Michael Moore, the 'Big One' himself.

Picture Edmund Burke, the 18th-century progenitor of modern conservatism--fat and rosy, eyes bright, jowls dripping. Now wipe off the powder and the make-up, replace the pea coat with a T-shirt and the wig with a Bulls baseball cap, flatten the accent, push him into the Mall of America, and voilà! You're watching Michael Moore.

Maybe you're even watching Moore's latest documentary, The Big One, starring Michael Moore as Michael Moore. Moore's mission in this series of capers is somewhat abstract. He's just written his bestselling Downsize This! and Random House has sent him on a 47-stop book tour. But Moore refuses the regular Boston-New York-Washington route, and instead plots a course through the Rust Belt. He includes Rockville, Ill., the worst place to live in America according to Money magazine. On his way, he pleads with CEOs for more humanitarian labor policies, agitates for unions at stores like Borders, interviews unemployed workers, and presents oversized checks to insensitive companies for items like the last Pay Day candy bar made in America.

Moore's rhetorical strategy isn't very different from the one Burke and his fellow conservatives used to raise support for a new regime in France in 1793: to shame those in power into acting ethically by exposing their hypocrisy to the public. Moore and Burke share a desperate, self-consciously tragic faith in the good and the beautiful. For all his joke-cracking cynicism, Moore's optimism never flags. If he can just show a CEO the conditions under which his company's laid-off workers live, they'd get their jobs back in an instant. Burke too pens maudlin descriptions of Marie Antoinette's arrest and incarceration, hoping to summon up the British people's nausea at the perverseness of the French Revolution. For Moore and Burke, socio-political theories are unimportant. Moore's as much a Marxist as Burke is a Lockeian. They only believe what they see: something horrible is happening, and no one is stopping it.

Like his predecessor, Moore sets out to prove that he is wittier, smarter, and more articulate than everyone he meets, and thereby hopes to generate enough personal authority to force his audience to agree with him no matter what he says. He mails President Bill Clinton, LAW '73, a check from the Hempgrowers of America. He challenges Nike CEO Phil Knight to a foot race. He shuffles footage that implies Steve Forbes may not be from Planet Earth. He even shows frightening clips of prison inmates taking reservations on behalf of TWA.

Moore's implicit solution to these problems is not a revolution so much as a return to old-fashioned noblesse oblige and Fordist high wages. There's no talk of exploitation or alienation; capitalism is fine as long as the factories stay in America. The People are entitled to charity from corporations precisely because they are the People, and the constitution was written for them. He's more a patriot than a radical.

All of which calls into question whether Moore can be called a liberal at all, hero to liberals though he may be. Like Burke, although born poor, he's somewhat closer to an aristocrat by the time his audience meets him. Moore unapologetically takes a first-class seat while his camera crew flies coach, treats his Random House escorts like toys, and proudly announces his status as a bestseller midway through the film. Numerous vignettes feature him as a stand-up comic, alone on a stage, spouting off before a wildly amused crowd (and well they should be--he's wildly amusing). While petit-bourgeois leftists shop at thrift stores and buy independent-label music, Moore shops at the mall and rides in a limousine. That he allows us to watch these scenes at all testifies to the guiltlessness of his nobility.

It's no wonder, then, that The Big One spotlights Moore and his personal struggles to the exclusion of most actual events in contemporary American labor. Clips of the Detroit newspaper strike fly by amid Moore's wry cracks at politicians and footage of his arrest for trespassing. He's in almost every scene, like the fat guy who blocks your view at the movies.

But Moore is talented enough to pull it off most of the time. The film never gets boring or stale, and its pathos never wears off. When Knight offers his opinion that Americans "don't want to work in shoe factories," Moore gathers 500 unemployed auto-workers from Flint, Mich., all clad in Nike apparel, to tell him that they do. When Knight spins yarns about the benefits of American factories to the third world, Moore splices in shots of barefoot shoe workers. By the end, when Knight refuses to change his policies, Moore manages to evoke more than sympathy from his audience. He finds almost a catharsis, the culmination of a tragic farce mostly, though indirectly, about himself--the Hamlet of late capitalism.

History wasn't kind to Edmund Burke: generous to a fault and easily angered, he died a pauper without a political legacy or much of a following. Maybe Moore's appeal will find a wider audience, and perhaps he will manage his money better. Perhaps something in this country will change, and capitalism will give way to a gentler system. In any case, America is sure to get some good movies out of it and Michael Moore is sure to have some fun.

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• Check out The Big One at Dog Eat Dog Films

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