Bognar and Reichert filmed inside a Chinese-owned Ohio plant and made a fair, patient film about two ways of working under one roof. It has more people than it has time for and a score that keeps consoling them, but it earns your evening.
In December 2008 the General Motors plant at Moraine, Ohio, built its last vehicle, and Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert filmed it; their short The Last Truck (2009) is about that day. Six years on a Chinese company called Fuyao bought the empty building to make car glass, and the filmmakers came back and stayed. American Factory is a good, patient, fair account of what happens when two ways of working are put under one roof. It has more stories than 110 minutes can hold, and Chad Cannon’s score is softer than it should be, but it is worth an evening.
The access is the first thing you notice. Fuyao let Bognar and Reichert into everything: the ribbon-cutting, where Senator Sherrod Brown mentions Ohio’s union history and the executives on the platform stop smiling; the meetings where Junming ‘Jimmy’ Wang, the vice president, tells newly arrived Chinese staff that Americans like to be praised and must be handled; a training session in which the locals are described as slow, with fat fingers. Dave Burrows and John Gauthier, the Americans hired to run the place, look more and more like men passing on instructions they do not agree with.
The Ohio workers are the heart of it. Shawnea Rosser inspects glass and compares what she earned at General Motors with what she earns now. Jill Lamantia drives a forklift and describes, without self-pity, how far her circumstances have fallen since. Cynthia Harper is asked to keep pace with machines that do not wait. These are fine, unforced portraits; we wanted more of them. The film keeps cutting away just as someone is about to say something new.
Bognar and Reichert do the same for the Chinese staff, which is where the film is unusual. Wong He, a furnace engineer, is a long way from his family and talks about it flatly, which is worse than tears. His American supervisor, Rob Haerr, invites the Chinese furnace crew to Thanksgiving and then to fire guns in his garden, and both men are puzzled to find they like each other. Later American managers are flown to the parent plant in China for the New Year party, where workers in matching costumes sing about the company. One of the visitors weeps in the front row. So, to our surprise, did we: the singing is sincere, the people are exhausted, and the film holds on their faces and lets you decide whether you are watching a party or a parade.
Lindsay Utz cuts it without a narrator and almost without captions. She sets the American morning meeting, where people shuffle in with coffee, against the Chinese one, where workers stand in rows and shout a slogan back at a supervisor, and leaves it there. The camerawork, shared between Bognar, Julia Reichert, Jeff Reichert, Erick Stoll and Aubrey Keith, is handheld and close, and the glass gets the best shots: orange sheets sliding out of the furnace. Cannon’s score is the one soft choice. It plays under people describing what they have lost and tells us, gently, that things will be all right, when the film has just shown us they will not.
The second half belongs to a campaign to unionise, which we will not describe past its start, and to Jimmy Wang, the most watchable person in the film: funny, frank, prone to saying on camera what most managers save for the car park, and then, by degrees, not funny at all. Rebecca Ruan-O’Shaughnessy, the company’s lawyer, appears with a smile that does not move. Some reviews have called the film’s treatment of the Chinese workers undifferentiated, even xenophobic. We think that is wrong; Wong He alone disproves it. But the film has room for one fully drawn Chinese worker and half a dozen Americans, and the imbalance shows.
Set against the observational documentaries it descends from, this is unusually even-handed and unusually easy to watch. It never bores. It never quite bites. See it with someone who has been told, at work, to be grateful, and see how long they stay quiet afterwards.
