Review: The Founder (2016)
The Founder tells the story of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a struggling salesman from Illinois who weasels his way into a hamburger business run by brothers, Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac McDonald (John Carroll Lynch). Kroc convinces the brothers to franchise their business, building the burger joint from an efficient single location in San Bernardino, California to the largest restaurant chain in the world. But he also sidelines the brothers in the process, robbing the brothers’ of their namesake, and possessing a legacy that is not his own.
The Founder is a compelling blend of heroic biopic and satire of the American Dream. Directed by John Lee Hancock, the man best known for all-American tales of decency, The Blind Side and The Rookie, you’d be forgiven for assuming The Founder is meant to celebrate Ray Kroc’s business success. The film’s opening sections even set up a mythic origin story of bootstrap economics. We watch Kroc unsuccessfully hocking milkshake mixtures across the Midwest. The man is downtrodden, but he presses on to put a roof over the head of himself and his dour wife (Laura Dern).
The filmmaking emphasizes his underdog gusto. Carter Burwell’s score swells like the score would during any conventional portrait of a great man. Hancock’s framing also makes a point of showing the smallness of Kroc’s office and the mundanity of his home. Everything seems to say that this man is our hero.
Eventually he catches a break when he gets an order from Dick McDonald, and sensing an opportunity, he drives all the way to San Bernardino to investigate the burger joint for himself. The place runs like an assembly line and the food tastes great. Kroc is smitten. He has to be a part of the business, but the McDonald brothers are leery. It’s a family business and Dick senses a shark in Kroc. Through sheer persistence Kroc forces his way into the business and convinces them to franchise in the Midwest. And this is where the film turns away from heroic business story to something more complicated and interesting.
Hancock continues to shoot the movie like a heroic underdog story, but he lets scenes play longer and pays careful attention to Kroc’s growing insufficiencies. For instance, every successive time Kroc comes home, the drink he pours himself grows larger. Kroc’s success with the franchise awakens a hunger he cannot sate, and so he starts to chase anything he wants, from a business partner’s wife to control over the recipes to the McDonald name itself. It helps that Michael Keaton stars as Kroc, lending him sympathy but also danger, courtesy of his oddball charisma. In the end, what started as a celebration of persistence and tenacity becomes a more sober examination of greed.
If The Founder is occasionally uncomfortably stuck between admiring Kroc’s success and satirizing what he represents about America, at least it has the conviction to demonstrate a full portrait of Ray Kroc’s strengths and weaknesses. For a film directed by the person who made The Blind Side, The Founder is admirably comfortable leaving the viewer with contempt for the man it’s ostensibly celebrating.
7 out of 10
The Founder (2016, USA)
Directed by John Lee Hancock; written by Robert Siegel; starring Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Linda Cardellini, Patrick Wilson, B.J. Novak, Laura Dern.