Review: The Founder

Art Smitten: Reviews - 2016

The Founder is screenwriter Robert D. Siegel’s scathing portrait of Roy Kroc, the eponymous creator of the McDonald’s Corporation, not to be confused with the McDonald brothers who created, well, McDonald’s. If that sounds as all suss it’s probably because it was. Kroc, as written by Siegel, and played by Michael Keaton, is a shameless anti-hero, an opportunistic businessman who listens more to his motivational tapes than he does to his own conscience, if indeed he has one. The film follows his great ascent (or descent, depending on how you look at it) from a not-so-humble milkshake-mixer merchant to the owner of a giant plagiarised franchise. He’s that kind of smarmy fourth-wall-breaking capitalist who is usually the smartest person in the room. However, Siegel, and director John Lee Hancock, both suggest he might simply be the most “persistent” person working in the food industry, since one of his favourite tapes tells him that neither genius nor talent can ever be a substitute for persistence. In his mind, persisting seems to mean sacrificing your integrity and your personal relationships for money.

This is exactly why Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), an honest pair of farmers, chose to abandon their first ill-fated attempt at franchising the business. When Kroc first suggests that they give it another go, they tell him they’d rather run one quality restaurant than fifty mediocre ones, especially since that first one in San Bernardino took them decades to build. While the brothers see their popular “Speedee Service System” as a wholesome masterwork of efficiency, Kroc sees it as a cash cow to be fattened, reproduced and milked for all its worth. Still, Mac thinks that Kroc can do a much better job of the expansion than they did, and Dick thinks that with the right contract he can safely keep Kroc on a leash. Even for those who don’t already know the story, there’s never any doubt how horribly this will end for the brothers. After all, Dick and Mac will always be looking out for each other and their legacy on top of the financial state of the business, while Kroc ticks all the boxes for a character who’s only looking out for himself and his bank account.

The most obvious of these, for an ambitious middle-aged man, is the routine long-suffering wife, played here by Laura Dern. A memorable quote from her character in Wild (2014) pretty well sums up much of her recent career: “I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life.” Especially in films like 99 Homes (from the same year) Dern has often played women who’ve had the men in their life make choices for them. Despite her being an incredibly supportive partner, The Founder shows Roy going behind her back to cancel their club memberships, disown their friendship group, mortgage their house, and ensure that she gets no part of McDonald’s Incorporated when he finally divorces her. Her submissiveness throughout most of this makes her one of the least interesting of these characters that Dern has played in recent years, but she makes it work well enough.

Still, she’s definitely not as engaging as Kroc’s second wife, Joan (Linda Cardellini), who Kroc courts when she’s still married to one of his new buyers. Once he’s stolen her away, and bought off the McDonald brothers as cheaply as he could, he quite literally has everything he’s ever wanted. By this point, every single character goal that Siegel sets up for him has been achieved (Given that this a true story, I don’t think this counts as a spoiler). For some reason, the last shot is of his big new bedroom mirror, which he looks into tearfully before going outside with Joan. I never took this character to be the crying type, but I hope they were tears of some twisted joy. If that was meant to be some sudden moment of feeling empty, remorseful or self-reflective, it was far too late to bring that in. The Founder might be a true story, but it’s hardly a human story. It’s actually quite cerebral and subversive in the way it questions the myth of the American dream. It’s essentially a cautionary tale against large scale enterprise, especially when Kroc starts comparing those big yellow McDonald’s arches to the Christian cross, and by extension suggesting that capitalism is America’s new religion, with franchise outlets as the new churches. This link is drawn even more strongly given that last year Keaton starred in Spotlight, the rather forgettable Best Picture winner about the corruption inside the Catholic Church. In its own way, The Founder is an even more chilling and timely reminder of what you can get away with once you have enough money and real estate to bury your crimes under.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas