Upon finishing “The Founder,” I had the most uncanny sense of deja vu, as if I had already watched and reviewed this movie 1,000 times. And yet I never had; in fact, I was watching an Oscar screener on my computer a month before it released.
Could it be that “The Founder” is simply another semi-biographical movie about a predatory capitalist success that whitewashes the horror just enough to make it watchable but not controversial, like a Catholic confessing committed sins? A movie filled to the brim with excellent performances and fun stylish quirks masking a spiritual hollowness? I thought a bit. Yes, it is both of those.
Yet something else lingers. Something else makes me feel like I experienced “The Founder” before, in a deeply emotional and impactful way. I can remember it like a dream, so vivid and bright. Yellow and red. A vision of the Golden Arches, and my fingers typing a review that tells you to grab a Quarter Pounder before driving to your local theater.
What sets “The Founder” apart from other movies of its ilk isn't so much a difference in kind but a difference in potency. Like the fast food joint that takes its name, you're not getting the best version of the product but rather one distilled to its core essence, an assembly-line product of which you can nonetheless get enough. Something you can consume without a second thought but, as the hours tick by, you realize how awful you feel and that you would have been just as well off staying away. But then ... more hours later ... you start to crave it again. You think, “That wouldn't be so bad.”
And when you bite into that second, third, fourth hamburger, when you lick the salt from your fingers and sip that ice-cold Diet Coke, you're consuming not just heavily processed food but the memories of every other time you partook in the capitalistic communion of a double cheeseburger, fries and a shake. This is the body of Americana, pumped up on bovine steroids for extra oomph; this is my blood, a milkless mixture of powder and water to cut down on overhead.
“The Founder” is about Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), the traveling salesman who swindled the two McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) out of their local food business and built a global empire out of it. It celebrates Kroc until it doesn't. In classic "guilty American" style, it makes you love him until it remembers you shouldn't (but hey, maybe you really should, OK?) The McDonald brothers perfected an assembly-line burger methodology; Kroc perfected the strategy of a corporation acting as landowner and trademark rather than as actual owner / operator of individual franchises. Keaton relishes the role, but, all things considered, Kroc is a walk for an actor so talented. Linda Cardellini and Laura Dern are terribly under-utilized as Kroc's two wives, reminding us that women are ultimately supporting players in a man's journey to monetary self-actualization.
Politics aside, there is nothing inherently unwatchable in “The Founder,” insomuch as there's nothing particularly great about it. It's perfectly serviceable entertainment, precisely what it appears to be. But that's all there is. There is no original vision, no new lesson you will learn beyond classic early 21st-century revelatory “the capitalists are all assholes but boy howdy they're also our heroes” storytelling, which, given our current national situation, we know very vividly to be the case.
My recommendation is for anyone seeking out a glimpse at when America was great is to see “Hidden Figures," a movie that celebrates actual heroic Americans and their role in history but doesn't skimp on how badly we chose to treat them. Maybe once the Third War is over we'll be able to look back at movies like "The Founder" and see it as a historical text about the stupidity of the Old American Empire but look back at "Hidden Figures" as a text that shows how hard many fought before we fell down, down, down.
Maybe if I make it, I'll write a review about whomever among us decides Soylent Green is a good idea. My review will start with deja vu about how it reminded me of "The Founder," and then I'll bitch about another half-hearted attempt at being honest about the worst of us. Maybe Keaton might star, and finally win his Oscar, carved from the soft spines of those who today worship men like Ray Kroc, who, in each moment, pull us towards cultural oblivion.