Review: The Founder

The Founder (12A)

USA 2016  115 mins  Dir: John Lee Hancock  Cast: Michael Keaton, John Carroll Lynch, Nick Offerman, Laura Dern, B.J. Novak, Linda Cardellini

Let’s be clear about this: The Founder is not a sequel, or even a prequel, to Fast Food Nation. There’s nothing here about animal cruelty, environmental destruction, exploited workers or supine breadline fatties gorging on skilfully marketed junk food until their fat-filled arteries explode. In short, the McDonald’s corporation’s expensive lawyers are unlikely to have any, ahem, beef with what’s portrayed on screen. But it is a pretty entertaining true life tale of win-at-any-cost ruthlessness with an obvious resonance for those who elected a playground bully as their president. There’s also another terrific central performance by Michael Keaton. It’s unfortunate that John Lee Hancock, of The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks fame, is behind the camera, though. A little more grit and somewhat less of Hancock’s trademark bland folksiness might have made the story much more fun.

It’s the early 1950s and Ray Kroc (Keaton) is a pushy, largely unsuccessful travelling salesman with a fixed grin, an oleaginous manner and a repertoire of glib patter drawn from the self-improvement records he uses to top up his flagging motivation on the road – such as The Power of the Positive, which stresses the merits of persistence and determination. Indeed, he’s the full Willy Loman-meets-Shelley Levene without any of the charm. He also has a high-maintenance wife (under-used Laura Dern) to support. So when Kroc comes across the McDonald brothers, Mac (Lynch) and Dick (Offerman), and their revolutionary, hugely popular San Bernadino fast food joint, he can smell money. Lots of it. Dick, in particular, resists his vision of franchising the business, being opposed to “cheap commercialism”, but silvery-tongued Kroc wears the siblings down with his obstinate refusal to go away. “McDonalds can be the new American church!” he announces grandly. Then he sets about hijacking the company and usurping its founders as he transforms their smalltown restaurant into a lucrative nationwide brand. Eventually, as the sly title suggests, they’re even written out of their own history.

Hancock’s depiction of the first McDonald’s restaurant feels like a glossy commercial set in a fantasy world where conscientious workers produce nutritious meals for consumption by healthy, wholesome all-American families (there’s not a waddling bloater in sight). But he also serves up a beautifully edited, exposition-heavy early sequence that shouldn’t work but does, in which the brothers explain the process of trial and error by which they arrived at their business model. Michael Keaton continues his welcome career resurgence with a superbly calibrated performance as Kroc, who’s at once driven and chillingly soulless. “Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful men with talent,” runs his cynical mantra.

The problem is that Hancock takes a viewpoint of mildly horrified fascination and never seems sure whether he wants to endorse the Trumpian reading of this particular variant on the fabled American Dream, in which the cautious, principled McDonalds are ‘losers’ and risk-taking, amoral Kroc is a ‘winner’, leading to an uncertainty of tone as punches are pulled and the brothers are sidelined in the movie as they were in life. When Kroc trades up in the marital department by seducing a franchisee’s wife (Cardellini), for example, the messy details are kept off screen. Still, we do get an answer to the obvious question of why the rapacious interloper didn’t just steal the McDonalds’ secrets, once they’d been revealed to him, and set up his own chain. Even the most eager junk food enthusiast might balk at chowing down on a Big Kroc.