Along with about 25 other people, I shuffled into an AMC theater last night to watch the wanna-be cause-celebre movie Beer Wars. People hoping for a first-rate bashing of big business and big beer were not disappointed. From the opening moment, director Anat Baron had Miller, Coors and especially Anheuser-Busch in her bullseye.
In an effort to save memory space, I stopped keeping track of the film's reasons Anheuser-Busch is evil but here's a partial list: It makes an inferior product; it's really big; it shot some cheesy promo videos in the '50s; it comes up with useless products to gain more grocery store shelf space; it buys a lot of other breweries; it pays lobbyists; it cares more about marketing than beer; it pushes competitors out; it supports wholesale distributors; the company's CEO August Busch IV won't give Anat Baron an interview.
The good guys are small. At least relatively. Craft brewers like Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione and Boston Beer Company founder Jim Koch may be in the top 50 breweries nation-wide but they're no match for evil Anheuser. The other protagonist is Rhonda Kallman, who is trying to get her New Century Brewery off the ground. She's hampered not so much by the big three but by the fact she can't find an investor for her caffeinated beer.
Assuming the Michael Moore gadfly role, Baron is in most shots, giving random people taste tests at bars, asking people on the street why beer companies need lobbyists, nodding sympathetically as Kallman attempts to get her caffeinated beer Moonshot into stores.
Often Baron goes too far.
As she's filming a sit-down interview with Anheuser-Busch brewer John
Serbia, Baron manipulates the camera angle to make Serbia come off
as distant and aloof when in reality, he's pleasant and supportive. The move is so obvious, and Serbia is so clueless that his words will be used against him, that I felt a tinge of
sadness for him and Anheuser-Busch. That's the opposite of what Baron is
trying to achieve.
I normally like David and Goliath documentaries. Roger and Me is one of my favorite films. But the biggest difference between Beer Wars and Roger and Me is that no one's really getting hurt by the beer makers. Nobody loses their job or is forced to kill rabbits for meat.
At the live Web event after the movie, Calagione admitted he's a wealthy man. Plus he gets to drink beer all day and this is the main guy
we're supposed to feel sorry for?
Actually, some people do
lose their jobs. Baron talks with former workers of the Rolling Rock
Brewery in Latrobe Pennsylvania. The brand was bought by Anheuser-Busch
and production immediately left for New Jersey. Like many in the rust
belt, these men were frustrated by the overnight disappearance of a company they'd been loyal to. But Baron didn't care about that, she only wanted to
know what they thought of Anheuser-Busch. The segment with the workers only lasts a minute, but it's the most real and poignant part of the movie.
And that story has a happy
ending, though it's not mentioned in the film. In 2007, a beer company
started production at Latrobe's massive brewery again. That company? None other than Koch's Boston Beer.
Showing 1-2 of 2
The sequence is:
nobody loses jobs.
Actually people lose jobs.
People gain jobs back.
I was trying to make the point that Roger and Me is about Flint, Michigan trying to cope from having a third of the city laid off at once. Where as Beer Wars is not about loss but simply about anger at Anheuser.
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