It's Hard To Find Much Meat On The Bones Of The Founder

In the 21st century, McDonalds has weathered a storm of bad publicity stemming from growing health concerns surrounding their food which has only been compounded by documentaries like Super Size Me. While McDonalds still makes money hand over fist, there's no denying their reputation has been tarnished greatly in the 2000's and it's likely never going to restore itself to its former reputation given how the fact that the companies food is so completely unhealthy is now basic knowledge. The Founder takes audiences back to a time when the word McDonalds had an aura of promise and innocence to it, to an era where the eatery was limited to just one location in California.

Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a milkshake mixer salesman whose always looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme, goes to this original McDonalds that just so happened to order eight of his milkshake mixers and discovers a restaurant like no other. The folks behind this McDonalds place are Mac (John Carroll Lynch) and Dick (Nick Offerman) McDonald and soon sign up for a deal with Ray that will franchise McDonalds across the nation. Mac and Dick have strict rules that each new McDonalds must abide by in terms of layout and food served and Ray looks to abide by those rules...mostly. Kind of. Actually, he's looking to squeeze as much money as he can out of this enterprise so maybe the rules are just sort of suggestions, right?

Having not been familiar with the history of McDonalds, I found myself oddly fascinated by their rise and fall, particularly in an extended story told by Mac and Dick about how they struggled for years to find success until they came up with the idea for an eatery that created the very concept of "fast food". The various corporate treachery that ends up screwing over these two time and time again is a classic tragic case of "Big guy picking on the little guy" and it's a type of plot The Founder actually depicts in a plenty watchable fashion. Seeing the rise of McDonalds betray its home-grown small-scale roots has a palpably tragic quality to it considering how much sweat, blood and tears Mac and Dick poured into the original McDonalds and it's good that that element takes up a crucial part of The Founder's plot.

Unfortunately, the majority of this movies story also concentrates on Ray Kroc, a Harold Hill slick conman type who basically stays that way from frame one of the movie to the very last image of the film. It's hard to glean any sort of commentary or symbolism from his static character arc, so despite a solid performance from Michael Keaton (who totally commits to every tenacity-laced speech Kroc delivers), watching Ray Kroc time and time again just screw over people and get even richer becomes more than a tad narratively repetitive since there doesn't seem to be a greater theme this type of storytelling is driving at.

There's a similarly lackluster quality found in the lone figure in Ray Kroc's personal life, a dutiful but underutilized wife played by Laura Dern. While the whole point of the character is that Kroc ignores her in favor of slavishly devoting himself to his work, it still feels like there could have been more profundity given to this character given how talented Laura Dern is as an actor. There's a similar underwritten quality to a later love interest of Ray Kroc's played by Linda Cardellini. All the stuff concentrated on Ray Kroc's personal life really is a snooze, while his deceit filled business ventures, though very much repetitive and lacking substance, at least have some moderate entertainment value to them.

Carter Burwell's score is, surprisingly, about as middling as the depictions of Kroc's personal life, with the musical accompaniment to the movie more often than not segueing into distracting paint-by-number music cues. On the other hand, the sets and props that help set The Founder in the late 1950's are actually splendid to look at, continuing John Lee Hancock's solid grasp of replicating mid-20th-century visual flourishes from his underrated 2013 effort Saving Mr. Banks. Hancock can hold his head high at least knowing The Founder ends up being a decent watchable effort that made me want to dive into books and documentaries chronicling the rise of this fast food empire, though the movie falls short on actually bringing anything at all insightful to the table when it comes to its lead non-fictional character.