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Michael Keaton accepts the praise as Founder of the McDonalds Business Empire |
Director: John Lee Hancock
Cast: Michael Keaton (Ray Kroc), Nick Offerman (Richard
McDonald), John Carroll Lynch (Maurice McDonald), Linda Cardellini (Joan
Smith), B.J. Novak (Harry J. Sonneborn), Laura Dern (Ethel Kroc), Justin Randell
Brooke (Fred Turner), Kate Kneeland (June Martino), Patrick Wilson (Rollie
Smith)
McDonalds. The
Golden Arches are ubiquitous, not just in America but across the whole world.
But how did this happen? How did a small business – just one stand in a small
town in America – suddenly become a global monolith?
Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) is a luckless travelling salesman,
selling supplies to drive-in diners. In California he encounters a diner the
likes of which he has never seen before: a walk-up restaurant serving high
quality food in disposable packaging, instantly. The business is McDonalds, run
by brothers Dick (Nick Offernan) and Maurice (John Carroll Lynch). Kroc
instantly recognises the potential of the business, and strikes a deal to
franchise the formula across America, although the McDonald brothers will maintain
control over all changes. Kroc, however, has the drive and ambition the
McDonald brothers lack – and he slowly begins to stretch and expand the deal,
taking on more and more power. Eventually he will become “The Founder” of the
business that bears his original partners’ names.
What’s interesting about The
Founder is that it has a certain element of wanting to have its cake and
eat it. It’s simultaneously a semi-celebration of American entrepreneurship and
a condemnation of big business crushing the little guy. This sounds like it
should make for a confusing film but actually it kinda works. It fits the
complex world of major business successes – someone like Kroc had the skills
and the ruthlessness to actually make McDonalds into a global super-company in
a way the McDonald brothers never did. At the same time, Kroc is clearly
incapable of creating anything himself (even most of his business-building
ideas come from other people) and the McDonald brothers have the real “American”
entrepreneurial invention to create something new.
So the film becomes an engaging story of how businesses grow
and develop, which largely manages to remove Hollywood sentiment from the
equation. Kroc isn’t exactly a hero – he’s selfish, ruthless and places himself
first constantly – but he’s not exactly a villain either. He’s a downtrodden
striver, who has too continually push to be accepted by those who look down on
him. He has a sense of loyalty and love for his brand – even while he begins to
shut the McDonald brothers out of their own business. Similarly the McDonald
brothers have a homespun honesty to them, but they are also naïve and
unrealistic in their demands and desires for the business.
The film relies a lot for its success on Keaton’s slightly
tragic desperation in the lead role, his yearning to improve and better
himself. The first half of the movie shows his charm but also demonstrates his
business acumen, his genius in recognising that what the McDonald brothers have
invented could work on a huge scale. He’s hard-working and initially luckless,
and the snobbish knock-backs he receives from banks and investors when peddling
an idea get us on his side – after all we know it’ll be worth billions. It’s a
Capraesque spin: he’s the little guy bucking against the system who becomes the
very monolithic monsterous system himself. We can’t even be certain where we
see the flip.
What becomes clear is that Kroc himself is somehow empty,
somehow slightly devoid of depth, a man able to move smoothly from concept to
concept with no lingering sense of guilt. He discards the McDonald brothers
(after copyrighting their name) with as much calmness as he drops his wife
(Laura Dern, in a thankless part as The Loyal Wife). Despite this though, the
film never brings itself to condemn Kroc. It's a little in love with the chutzpah of Kroc’s success and his
persistent positivism, while seeing those he has had to drop on the way as
tragic victims of the monolithic American business success Kroc has created.
We are invited to have similar sympathetic feelings about
the hapless McDonald brothers: innocents in a world of business, able to create
something that can change the world but hopelessly incapable of translating it
into the type of scale that it could achieve. The film doesn’t forget that the
McDonald brothers are the victims here, and Offerman and Lynch are both superb
as two brothers with a deep personal bond and a love for their business and
each other. But it also partly follows Kroc’s line – these two do not have the
vision and ambition to take their idea to the next level. They are innovators
but they are small-scale ones. The film daringly doesn’t just take their side
as the little guys crushed by the system; it also allows itself to consider if
they to a certain extent failed themselves. They never learn either, accepting
Kroc’s handshake agreement for future royalties at the end of the film, an
agreement we are all too aware even when it is happening will probably never be
met.
The film has a certain love for the Americana of McDonalds
and fast food joints, and it’s both an advert for the triumph of the business
(the customers are all uniformly happy, and the ordinary employees in Kroc’s
empire are all wonderfully warm) and a sad testament to the small businessman
being swept aside by the big company. It’s quite a feat for the film to manage
both at the same time and remain coherent. It’s both an advert for and attack
on McDonalds, but it holds both these ideas simultaneously at the same time
really well. Well worth a watch.
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