The Founder

Synopsis: The story of how Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) took the name of a small eatery in California and turned it into a global icon.

As he showed with his previous film, Saving Mr Banks (2013), director John Lee Hancock knows how to charm an audience (I haven’t seen his prior film, 2009’s The Blindside but as it handed Sandra Bullock a Best Actor Oscar, I'm guessing that it’s of a piece).  With an intelligent, economical script, tasty performances from Michael Keaton and a strong support cast, its mouth-watering retro '50s production design providing a cornucopia of period fashion in architecture, cars, clothes, hairdos and retail style together with flawless quality control from chef Hancock, The Founder is tip-top mainstream entertainment that, unusually for Hollywood, manages not to overplay its hand.

In a heavy-lifting role that will probably get him an Oscar nomination, Keaton, as he showed in 2014’s Birdman, the film that gave his career its second wind, is very good at playing quietly desperate, as initially the Chicago-born son of Czech immigrants pursues the American Dream as the head and sole salesman of a struggling outfit selling milkshake mixers to fast food joints.  

The self-hypnotizing rhetoric of business success is a central motif of the deft script by Robert D. Siegel (who wrote The Wrestler (2008) and Big Fan 2009) as we watch Kroc appropriate a successful but parochial roadside fast-food outlet, then a concept in its infancy, and inflate it well beyond the expectations of its original owners, Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch). So much so, that he eventually muscles them out as he, with surprisingly little effort, turns it into a multi-billion dollar global business for which the family values that were central to the brothers' original vision for their San Bernardino restaurant is merely an advertising ploy.

It’s not a flattering portrait. If his hands are not exactly covered in blood (as is so often the case, once his fortunes turned Kroc divorced his first wife, played by Laura Dern, who sustained him through his long years of drudgery and re-married twice, although we only see the third wife, played by Linda Cardellini), Kroc the empire builder is made out to be a shallow opportunist quite prepared to bend truth to his purpose. Hancock doesn’t pretend to explore any depth of character.  Indeed one suspects that there wasn’t anything more to the self-styled "founder" of McDonalds than an urgent need for material success. Rather the film's tone is wryly good-humoured as it charts Kroc's rise and the brothers' fall with all that says about American capitalism. In this spirit, in a closing footnote the film acknowledges the Krocs’ considerable philanthropy.

The focus in Hancock's film is on the telling of an entertaining story and in this respect, whatever you may think of their food, The Founder delivers very good value for money.

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