Fleeting Yet Satisfying
John Lee Hancock’s The Founder is the fast food version of The Social Network in more ways than one. Like the dramatization of the founding of Facebook, it tells the story of a man who takes a pre-existing concept and realizes its full potential on a much larger, more profitable scale. Where Mark Zuckerberg expanded on the notion of a digital meeting place for college friends, multimixer salesman Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) took the ultra-efficient kitchen and delicious food of the McDonald brothers’ hamburger stand and ultimately turned it into the worldwide behemoth it is today. As in The Social Network, there’s more than a little back-stabbing and litigation, but where The Founder is a satisfying but forgettable McDonald’s burger, The Social Network is a perfectly cooked steak.
Good performances anchor this fairly lightweight tale, with Keaton an excellent slimy salesman. He’s persistent without being rude, and his drive is made only more evident when he returns home from a business trip—during which he desperately tries to sell milkshake mixers to uninterested restaurateurs—to a nice home and loyal wife (Laura Dern). He’ll never settle for less than the greatness he thinks he has in him. The flickers of warmth Keaton gives Kroc are essential both to endear him to the audience and so that when he meets Mac (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick (Nick Offerman) MacDonald, he seems genuine, and not totally opportunistic. Mac is the excited optimist of the two brothers, the dreamer excited by what Kroc could help them achieve. Dick is the genius, the brains behind McDonald’s more revolutionary features, though he’s a dreamer too, if a particularly cautious one.
The film’s best sequence is when Kroc, amazed by the McDonalds’ burger stand, takes them out to dinner to hear their story. Lynch’s Mac obviously relishes telling their story with enthusiasm, occasionally throwing to Dick for explanations of their game changing ideas, which Offerman delivers with his trademark deadpan that still manages to include some enthusiasm of its own. The MacDonald brothers’ story plays out like a mini documentary, with photographs and recollections pieced together with terrific pacing to become a film within the film. It’s the moment in The Founder that truly sells how revolutionary the McDonald’s model was at the time, something essential to understanding Kroc’s amazement and dedication, given the prevalence of fast food restaurants today.
From that moment forward, the audience, like the brothers, are in Keaton’s hands. He encapsulates the excitement and frustration of starting the franchise arm of McDonald’s business with partners firmly dedicated to adhering to the formula they know to be successful. Kroc knew that consistency was key, and once he figured out how to achieve it, his true hurdle with the brothers was changing the formula to make it profitable. The Founder’s best trick is making you think Kroc isn't as bad as his actions make him look. He disobeys the brothers, but it's because they’re keeping the business from achieving large scale success. It's when Kroc’s actions fly in the face of quality—and when the MacDonalds have finally been robbed of the only thing that means something to them—that it’s clear that Kroc was never going to settle simply because the brothers were happy with less.
Hancock is a capable director (he made the divisive Saving Mr. Banks, which I like a great deal), and he does a fine job with Robert D. Siegel’s screenplay, but The Founder ends up as exactly that; fine. The performances are strong, as are the production design and technical elements of the film, but this is ultimately a story where the facts are more interesting than the emotion. The MacDonald brothers’ Speedee Service System and Kroc’s evolution of the franchise business into a real estate company are the more intriguing elements, because we already know which character goes on to get the credit and the glory. Without those strong emotional stakes, The Founder comes and goes with the same speed and ease as a fast food meal.