Doug Pray's Big Rig follows several (maybe 10 or 12) truck drivers back and forth across the America. The film resists giving the audience a single overarching narrative thread and instead chooses to show most of his subjects in discrete vignettes. The approach has mixed success. The downside is simple, but important: Some of the truckers are more interesting subjects than others, so my interest in the movie waxed and waned with each featured trucker. Happily, the last two individuals (an outspoken Native American and a Polish emigree) were among the most interesting so, in the end, the picture did send me out on a high note.
The positive angle to Pray's strategy is that, by meeting so many truckers in the film, the film encourages us to make some generalizations about what might be termed "trucker values."
Those values amount to a mess of contradictions. Many of the truckers are simultaneously patriotic and anti-government; outspoken and, yet, against voting; and they hold traditional "family values", yet they're rarely at home. (Whether being on the road alone is the source or the result of these values is, sadly, left unexplored.)
Let me quickly add that I'm not condemning these contradictions. Quite the contrary: To me, one of Big Rig's strengths is that Pray exposes one subculture's contradictions in a way that is non-judgmental, even warm.
Big Rig has other things going for it (like Pray's gorgeous digital cinematography, which was shot on a Varicam), and against it (it had a couple too many landscape montages), but it has ultimately stayed with me because it features articulate, conservative, blue-collar Americans as its heroes. In this era of the "liberal documentary", it's worth remembering that if cinema is going to play a role in social change, first it must help bridge the divide that "red state vs. blue state" simplifications have created. This kind of respectful, human documentary investigation helps build that bridge.