The Founder

The Founder was, at one time, being groomed by The Weinstein Company as a big Award Season movie.  But, for whatever reason, the studio got cold feet, and is now dumping it in January with little fanfare.  I honestly can't imagine why.  This is a great little movie, with a captivating lead performance by Michael Keaton.  In all honestly, I ended up liking this much more than Lion (which I did enjoy), the movie the Weinsteins did choose to be their Award hopeful.

Even if it lost out on the chance of being one of the great films of 2016, it is now officially the first great film of 2017.  It tells the true story of Ray Kroc (Keaton), a middle-aged fast-talking salesman who in 1954, was struggling to make ends meet by working on the road and selling milkshake mixers to largely uninterested clients.  His life and his fortunes took a turn when he discovered a revolutionary little burger stand in California run by two forward-thinking, but naive, brothers.  Their restaurant, called McDonald's, was unlike anything at the time, creating a streamlined cooking process that could have your order in seconds instead of a half hour, and dreaming up many ideas that would become staples of the fast food world, such as having the food packed in wrappers, and a walk up window to order food from.  The film tells the story of how Ray appealed to the brothers to franchise the business, and then slowly but surely took total control of their empire by doing things on his terms, and generally rewriting history.

The McDonald Brothers, Dick and Mac (played wonderfully by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman), knew they had something good, and were very protective of their dream restaurant.  However, Ray had the ambition that they did not, and the instinct on how to build a multi-million dollar empire.  That's what separated them.  In a way, The Founder is not far removed from The Social Network, which also told the story of someone who had the ambition to take an idea like Facebook and fly with it.  Ray saw the "Golden Arches" logo (which one of the brothers had dreamed up) as a sign that could be as American as the flag, and he knew how to capitalize on it.  As Ray's ambition grew, and he started placing McDonald's restaurants all across the Midwest and eventually the U.S., he also found himself wanting to work away from the McDonalds themselves, and turn the franchise into something entirely his own.  By the time it was over, he had fleeced his former bosses out of their own company, and was telling everyone that the restaurant had been his idea.  He even went so far as to name the first McDonald's he franchised as the #1 restaurant, instead of the original in California.

The success of the movie is credited to two crucial elements.  First, there's the incredibly smart screenplay by Robert Siegel (The Wrestler), which is not only sunny and breezy, but also incredibly funny in a very dark way.  It views Kroc as somewhat of a smooth talking con artist who knew all the angles, and how to get what he wanted, while essentially cheating certain people out of what was rightfully theirs.  But at the same time, he comes across as being charismatic, and well, kind of likable.  This is thanks to the second element, which is Keaton's performance.  His casting can only be labeled a stroke of genius, as he is able to make Kroc into somewhat of a shady character, but an undeniably charming one, who knew how to talk people into working with or for him.  We get to see how he wooed different investors into franchising the restaurant, and even how he wooed the wife of one of his investors. (He was married at the time, his first wife played by Laura Dern, who does the best she can with a somewhat underwritten, but still somewhat heartbreaking role.)

There are some fascinating moments here, as we see how Ray Kroc cut costs in order to boost profits, such as using powdered milkshake mix instead of real milkshakes, whose ingredients required a massive and expensive refrigeration unit.  We see how he put his entire life, even his own home, on the line for the company, and how he constantly came out on top, while the exasperated McDonald Brothers back in California could do little about it.  To be fair, I would have liked to have seen what went into some of the more popular aspects of McDonald's.  We don't get to see the invention of certain famous menu items like the Big Mac, nor do we get to see the creation of the Ronald McDonald character.  This is entirely Ray's story, and his determination to get to the top no matter what it took, or who he had to step on.  Fortunately, it's an interesting one, and the screenplay and Keaton's performance know how to grab our attention from early on and never let go.

The Founder was directed by John Lee Hancock, who is famous for making more uplifting biofilms, such as The Blind Side or Saving Mr. Banks.  Here, he inhabits a gray area.  It pulls no punches in showing that Kroc was essentially a crook who took a lot of people for a ride, and wound up laughing all the way to the bank.  Still, he is wise not to entirely vilify him, and to essentially make him the all around story of the American Dream.  How through hard work and determination, this man who thought life had passed him by was able to make it in the world.  The tone of the film seems to both admire and be just a little bit horrified by its subject matter, and I think the movie finds the right balance.  It gives the movie a certain darkly comic edge that we don't usually find in a lot of "based on a true story" films, which usually try to paint their subject in as grand a light as possible.

The Founder is strongly compelling, and one of the rare times I wanted a movie to be longer, as I thought there was even more to the story that could have been told.  It's so perfectly paced and well written, you can't help but want more.  The movie ends up being memorable, not just because it's a great movie being released in a month usually reserved for sludge, but also because it's just a great story that I'm surprised Hollywood didn't try to tell sooner.

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