The Founder (2016)
Directed by John Lee Hancock
The true story of how Ray Kroc, a salesman from Illinois, met Mac and Dick McDonald, who were running a burger operation in 1950s Southern California. Kroc was impressed by the brothers’ speedy system of making the food and saw franchise potential. He maneuvered himself into a position to be able to pull the company from the brothers and create a billion-dollar empire.
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“The Founder” isn’t a McDonald’s takedown in the manner of, say, Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Super Size Me”; it is, on one level, an elegy for what the company might have been, but it’s also wise enough to know that McDonald’s is interesting only because of what it became.
This is not Super Size Me , not a denunciation of McDonald’s as a dealer pushing junk food on susceptible consumers.
If Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” hasn’t already given you second thoughts about patronizing McDonald’s, “The Founder” wants to eliminate any doubt.
Hancock knows how to find visually elegant ways to depict the art of creation, and he scores a coup early on: Dick choreographing a mock version of the first McDonald’s kitchen on a tennis court, employees swirling and darting like dancers over chalk outlines à la Lars von Trier’s “Dogville.”
It’s like Martha Graham, Dogville, and Ronald McDonald had a beautiful cinematic child.
Kroc dreams big, and believes in his ability to make those big dreams happen – a point further underscored when he ducks into a showing of On the Waterfront.
Kroc is depicted as desperate; he watches On The Waterfront and his favourite song is Pennies From Heaven, he’s evangelical about the potential of McDonald’s, and his marriage to Laura Dern has hit a wall, which makes this “professional leech” a “wolf in the henhouse” with everything to play for.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to watch Michael Keaton plow through the myriad facts provided by members of the McDonald family estate to orchestrate some character details of his own—swigging rye, gleaning inspiration from his favorite movie On the Waterfront, listening joyfully to the song “Pennies From Heaven” as his marriage to the wife who sees through him (Laura Dern) tanks.
If The Founder had guts to make enemies with Ronald McDonald, it could be this century’s Citizen Kane, indicting us in his 119-country conquest.
As director John Lee Hancock said recently, the raw material could be developed in any number of ways: as a dark penetrating story of a mogul who fails as a human being (Citizen Kane or There Will Be Blood ), as a barbed satire ( The Wolf of Wall Street ) or, as a story of betrayal ( The Social Network ).
Listen closely in The Founder and there’s somber complementary music evoking Bernard Herrmann’s score for Citizen Kane.
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As director John Lee Hancock said recently, the raw material could be developed in any number of ways: as a dark penetrating story of a mogul who fails as a human being (Citizen Kane or There Will Be Blood ), as a barbed satire ( The Wolf of Wall Street ) or, as a story of betrayal ( The Social Network ).
What the two movies do have in common — with each other, and with another Sorkin-scripted drama, “The Social Network” — is a fascination with a powerfully disruptive moment in American commerce.
The story of how businessman Ray Kroc essentially stole the McDonald’s empire from brothers Dick and Mac McDonald has the makings of a fascinatingly dark drama about greed and betrayal, along the lines of David Fincher’s The Social Network.
In that sense, The Founder is remarkably like David Fincher’s The Social Network, which heavily fictionalized the story of Facebook’s creation without particularly touching on why the social platform is such an addictive draw for some people, or how it changed the way large segments of the world interact with each other today.
John Lee Hancock’s whip-smart, breezy, sunny and yet also darkly funny “The Founder” tells the story of Kroc’s takeover of McDonald’s in a fashion that reminded me of a half-century-earlier version of “The Social Network,” with burgers instead of Facebook; a fiftysomething salesman in lieu of a cocky Ivy Leaguer, and the hunky-handsome Winklevoss twins replaced by a couple of super-square brothers who woke up one day and learned they didn’t even own the rights to their own names any more.
In its frank and finger-pointing portrayal of the greedy foundations on which the company’s global real estate empire is built, the film is similar to The Social Network or Steve Jobs; it’s also driven through choppy narrative waters by a single powerhouse performance.
A more sharply satiric and expansive director, such as Robert Altman or Michael Ritchie (“The Candidate”), could have turned this material into a classic love-hate letter to “American” values.
Move over “Wall Street,” as the best movie on American capitalism may now well be THE FOUNDER, the story of how salesman Ray Kroc, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Keaton, took a California hamburger stand run by two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch) and turned it into a worldwide restaurant chain.
Had it gained any traction, it could have been the Wall Street for a new generation, with Michael Keaton's Ray Kroc replacing Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko as the capitalist pig most adored by conservatives across the land.
We see this in flashback, the staging an echo of Field of Dreams, a hazy promise that decent folk will always turn up to celebrate a pure and simple American ideal.
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The Founder opens with Michael Keaton as Kroc delivering a strained sales pitch for a milkshake mixer directly to the camera with all the sweaty, unctuous desperation of Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross.
Written by Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler) and directed by Hancock with remarkable assurance and style, The Founder starts as a straight-up Horatio Alger story, the tale of a perennial underdog whose work ethic and tenacity finally make him a winner in the world of business.
It’s a chilling moment – pause to consider national obesity rates – and one of the few overt instances in which the script, by Robert Siegel (The Wrestler), encourages the viewer to connect the dots between these historical events depicted and the fast-food chain’s now-ubiquity.
The film's decidedly unappealing view of Kroc — this is very much the chronicle of a self-made villain — puts him in line with the fictional protagonists of screenwriter Robert D. Siegel's other films: Mickey Rourke's fading costumed grappler in The Wrestler and Patton Oswalt's obsessive football stalker in Big Fan.
This is less surprising material, however, for Siegel, whose finely scaled scripts for “The Wrestler” and “Big Fan” likewise probed the bleak flipside of a quintessentially American will to win — the difference being that “The Founder” examines the spoils (in all senses of the word) of victory rather than defeat.
Hancock using a screenplay by Robert Siegel (The Wrestler) and rumoured to be highly worked over has opted for an angst-free mood and go for a style that reminded me of light social comedy/drama: a bit like early Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin men) minus the frequent one-liners.
Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”) and writer Robert Siegel (“The Wrestler”) do an admirable job of not passing judgement one way or the other on their subject.