THE BIG ONE (1997)
Reviewed By Jerry Saravia
(originally reviewed in 1998)
"The Big One" is a pleasurable comedy, masquerading as a documentary, focusing on Michael Moore's attempts to focus on the truth surrounding the layoffs in Michigan and around the United States. We see unemployed people barking at Michael Moore and at the cameras about their poverty, Borders Bookstore employees complaining about tax cuts on their paychecks, a woman crying to Moore at one of his book signings about her inability to find work, and the penultimate moment when Moore confronts the Nike chairman and asks him why people in Mexico are working for 80 cents an hour.
"The Big One" has lots of scattered moments of truth, and plenty of it is just hearsay - the scene where the workers yell to Moore is obviously staged. I enjoyed the scenes where Moore and his video crew enter places of business and are threatened to leave, or when he gives some associates and bigwigs a big, fat check for 80 cents to the Mexican workers because "we want to help them out." All of this will be very familiar to anyone who's seen "Roger and Me" or his TV series "TV Nation."
Moore has a lot of good arguments about what's happening to hard workers around the country who work for candy companies or GM - if these corporations are making so much money, why are there so many layoffs? One word: competition, so they can be ahead of the others. That is why they pay so little to Mexican vagrants or children in Mexico and other countries - it is cheap labor for maximum profit. And then there are the airline workers who make flight reservations - nothing unusual about that except some of them are prisoners!
"The Big One" is very funny throughout and is more tightly edited than "Roger and Me." Moore could have a career as a comedian if he wants it, but he is after bigger game - to expose the truth through nuggets of humor. Some may say he is just exploiting the workers he's documenting. I would say he's exploiting the exploiters.
