The Founder

John Lee Hancock tries to put a creative twist on his penchant for schmaltz but comes up a few fries short of an order with The Founder, his dramatic recounting of the evil origins of McDonald’s. Functioning something like a supervillain origin story, The Founder’s appeal is rooted largely in the performance of Michael Keaton, but the script’s structural issues hamstring Keaton’s best efforts and shortchange the rest of the film’s standout cast to a staggering degree.  The result is the cinematic equivalent of a powdered milkshake — a little too sweet for what it’s trying to be, and lacking the visceral joys of the real thing.

The principle flaw in the film’s scripting is its lack of a central antagonist. Keaton’s Ray Kroc could be considered the antihero of the piece, but Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch, respectively) produce so much saccharinity with their aw-shucks optimism and can-do attitude that they struggle to provide an adequate dramatic foil for Kroc’s world-conquering ambition and sense of entitlement. Offerman and Lynch are both fantastic, but their roles are too unidimensional to establish an effective counterbalance to Keaton’s dynamic megalomania. Even Keaton’s bombast is repressed until the third act, when he forcibly extricates the McDonald’s empire from its creators with demented glee. This is the performance I was waiting for, but we only get about 30 minutes of it — to the great detriment of the film as a whole.

This problematic lack of conflict through the film’s first two acts was totally avoidable, making its absence all the more egregious. Laura Dern is tragically wasted, playing Kroc’s one-note shrewish wife. An actress with her prodigious talents could have injected the proceedings with the tension they so sorely need. Instead, she’s relegated to maudlin mopery and soap opera melodrama that falls distinctly flat. Similarly, Kroc’s budding extramarital relationship with future wife Joan (Linda Cardellini) carries none of the dramatic weight inherent in its salacious origins — another missed opportunity to develop dramatic discord.

Hancock’s visual style is a little too polished and brightly lit to convey the menace of a man like Kroc, and his worldview bears a Pollyannaish sensibility that’s ill-suited to the ramifications of this story. While he seems to grasp the sinister implications of Kroc’s rise to power — and is theoretically on the right track in trying to promote audience identification with a man who becomes a sociopathic monster under the weight of his own determination — he fails to achieve the moral ambiguity that was ostensibly his aim.

Despite its numerous drawbacks, the third act of The Founder is a hell of a lot of fun. Keaton revisits the demented madness that earned him an Oscar nod for Birdman but adds a dash of the black humor that kicked off his career in Nightshift, while Offerman more than holds his own against a strong cast of veteran character actors. A subtle sense of social commentary creeps into the proceedings as Kroc’s Trumpian ethos is overtly summed up by Offerman’s Dick McDonald with the phrase, “If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.” But the high points of The Founder’s final 30 minutes can’t make up for the long slog it took to get there, leaving the film struggling to answer for the failed impact of its pulled punches. It’s not a terrible film by any stretch. But, like much of the food on offer at McDonald’s, it looks a lot better than it is. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. 

Now playing at Regal Biltmore Grande.