Hollywood, land of stick figures and kale salads, has not been kind to poor McDonald’s and its 300 billion burgers sold. From direct hits like Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s grandstanding overture into the pop-doc genre, to indirect slams like Fast Food Nation, with its grimace-worthy evidence of cow feces making its way into the meat grinders of megachains like so much special sauce, the Golden Arches have seemed, in our darkened theaters, as black as stomach cancer.
Cowspiracy, Food Inc., Forks Over Knives and other examples of choir-preaching agitprop all hammered home the same message: Fast food equals poison, and McDonald’s is the No. 1 dispenser of this addictive arsenic. Even as a health-conscious eater, I concede that enough is enough: All of this cogent piling on isn’t exactly Blackfishing Mickey D’s into submission.
Into the contentious issue of food politics enters The Founder, a biopic about McDonald’s franchiser Ray Kroc, a movie whose inauspicious January opening betrays its no-win situation. Because the only thing worse than another grave lecture about McDonald’s killing us with calories is a hagiographic lionization of its creator. And it’s hard to gaze at its poster and tagline — Kroc’s confident figure, hands on hips, bisecting the Arches under the words “Risk Taker. Rule Breaker. Game Changer.” and expect anything but the latter.
Au contraire. Not only is John Lee Hancock’s movie only tangentially about food, it’s also brazenly anti-capitalist, a initial paean to bootstrapped perseverance that erodes, slowly but surely, into a cautionary tale about unfettered avarice. As Robert D. Siegel’s well-researched screenplay relays it, the risk taker, rule breaker and game changer was, unequivocally, a psychopathic monster.
Yet Hancock, a director of soft, middlebrow awards bait like The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks, likes apocryphal Americana too much to lead with that revelation. In its dramatically inert first half, it’s hard to say exactly where the movie stands on Kroc, because Hancock is too enamored with 1950s heartland mythologizing. We first meet Kroc (Michael Keaton, squirrelier than ever), an unctuous salesman in the food service industry, in 1954, hulking around a cumbersome new milkshake mixer and an overly rehearsed pitch to disinterested proprietors of drive-in restaurants.
As Kroc traverses flyover country, through depopulated suburbs and thoroughfares as unclogged as pre-McDonald’s arteries, the settings evoke a falsely simple time. Jim Crow doesn’t seem to exist, because fast food, as Kroc soon learns, is the ultimate equalizer: At McDonald’s, a homegrown eatery founded by Maurice and Richard McDonald (John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman), all races, sexes and ages are unified by the shared nirvana of a burger in a bag.
For Kroc, his visit to this innovative restaurant, with its “Speedee Service System,” is a revelation. The Golden Arches are his golden ticket to the upper class. Never mind that the McDonald brothers, presented as humble purists interested only in delivering satisfying (and quality) food at a discounted rate; Kroc has plans for national franchising. His pitch works on the skeptical siblings, and soon enough contracts are signed, land is bought, arches are erected, franchisees are sought. And if Kroc has to bend one of the McDonald brothers’ strict rules for quality control, so what? To make an omelet, you have to crack a few eggs, right?
The Founder is a strange movie. It’s poorly directed and choppily edited, with unearned expressionistic camera angles, pacing that feels both hurried and slack, and a musical score as intellectually empty as an office cat poster. Its form is entirely secondhand and as dutifully formulaic as an assembly line burger; I don’t need to tell you that there will be an inevitable growth montage of ribbons cut, checks signed and platitudes spouted, because it’s that kind of movie.
In fact, the story of McDonald’s’ expansion from an independent dive to a fast-food juggernaut seems to proceed without incident, so much so that its rationale for existence as a motion picture is, for a good 45 minutes, suspect.
But the moral arc screenwriter Siegel bestows on Kroc makes for a devastating polemic, with or without Hancock’s prettifying of the past. Despite its warm, toasty, even churchy overtures, The Founder is a surprisingly potent hit job on a man who embodies everything detestable the business world: a vulture capitalist, a talentless parasite, a self-serving rewriter of history.
In one of his increasingly contentious telephone spars with McDonald’s real founders, Kroc spouts, “If my competitor were drowning, I’d walk over and put a hose in his mouth.” President-elect Trump would be proud.
THE FOUNDER. Director: John Lee Hancock; Cast: Michael Keaton, John Carroll Lynch, Nick Offerman, Laura Dern, Patrick Wilson, Linda Cardellini, B.J. Novak; Distributor: The Weinstein Company; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at most area theaters