The Founder

In 2008, the finan­cial cri­sis ruined the lives of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans. Then, in 2012, Mar­tin Scorsese’s dizzy­ing satire of greed, The Wolf of Wall Street, went wide­ly inter­pret­ed as an inspir­ing­ly gung-ho tale of ruth­less suc­cess. And only a few months sep­a­rate us from the elec­tion of a well known crook as Pres­i­dent of the USA.

Yet today, John Lee Hancock’s McDonald’s ori­gin sto­ry The Founder presents, at least con­cep­tu­al­ly, the refresh­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty of an unam­bigu­ous cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ism. In its iconog­ra­phy, busi­ness mod­el and glob­al reach, McDonald’s rep­re­sents a short-hand for the eco­nom­ics of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism and cul­tur­al impe­ri­al­ism. At the most cru­cial moment imag­in­able, Hol­ly­wood has the real oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore the dark side and expose the real con­se­quences of an indus­try bewitched by big busi­ness, raw prof­it and indi­vid­ual interest.

Unlike more straight­for­ward finan­cial satires, how­ev­er, The Founder presents an alter­na­tive. The film goes deep­er in its analy­sis, con­vinc­ing­ly demon­strat­ing how the pur­suit of pure prof­it has not always been the prin­ci­pal goal of Amer­i­can busi­ness. Like all six sea­sons of Mad Men before it, this film con­ceives of that goal as a rel­a­tive­ly recent devel­op­ment. Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca is the world leader when it comes to free enter­prise, so the film touch­es a pret­ty sen­si­tive nerve in the con­text of US culture.

As the film open­ly and dar­ing­ly acknowl­edges, McDonald’s today is such an inte­gral part of Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty, so wrapped up with the con­cept of prof­it at the expense of qual­i­ty, that few would sus­pect it did not at all start as an exer­cise in pure avarice.

This is the untold sto­ry of two whole­some broth­ers whose hon­est-to-good­ness ham­burg­er busi­ness was stolen from them and trans­formed into a glob­al mono­lith. The film focus­es on trav­el­ling sales­man Ray Kroc (a ter­rif­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted Michael Keaton), the ​‘founder’ referred to in the film’s iron­ic title. Pro­gres­sive­ly exploit­ing hum­ble broth­ers Dick (Nick Offer­man) and Mac (John Car­oll Lynch) who came up with the com­pa­ny con­cept, Kroc is pre­sent­ed as a ruth­less spec­i­men. The film’s mat­ter-of-fact­ness expos­es what Kroc – in pure Amer­i­can Dream par­lance – refers to as ambi­tion for the self­ish greed that it actu­al­ly is.

Unusu­al­ly for what is a con­ven­tion­al Hol­ly­wood prod­uct (and per­haps for legal rea­sons) the film often lets the audi­ence fill in blanks with odd nar­ra­tive ellipses and remarks from char­ac­ters that inevitably, and with a pro­found­ly sad irony, hint at the state of McDonald’s today. When Kroc sug­gests replac­ing real ice-cream with cheap­er instant solu­tion, Dick remarks, ​“why not have frozen fries, too?” For a moment, a bru­tal shad­ow is cast in this oth­er­wise mild, not par­tic­u­lar­ly con­fronta­tion­al film.

Though it is rather bland­ly realised, poor­ly scored and per­haps not aggres­sive enough when it presents Kroc’s obnox­ious atti­tude towards the broth­ers and his wife Ethel (a crim­i­nal­ly under-served Lau­ra Dern), the poten­tial for this sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle-known sto­ry to shake Amer­i­can cul­ture to its core makes it a worth­while enter­prise. If this open attack on the base­ness that fur­thers cap­i­tal­ist greed can touch more peo­ple that way, and at a point when the ulti­mate cap­i­tal­ist ​‘suc­cess’ sto­ry has just become POTUS, then it is more than wel­come on screens.