The Founder
John Lee Hancock (2016)
What’s in a name? According to Ray Kroc in The Founder, it’s a big deal, in every sense. In the climax to the film, the self-styled title character, having already set up The McDonald’s Corporation, buys out the two men who really started the McDonald’s story. Dick McDonald wonders why Ray didn’t simply steal his and brother Mac’s fast-food concept and develop it independently. Ray’s answer is that their surname was indispensable. He thinks it evokes quintessential, reassuring Americanness; so different, he says, from the ‘harsh, Slavic sound’ of his own name, though he doesn’t acknowledge sharing that with a predatory reptile renowned for its massive jaws and prominent choppers. Michael Keaton wears false teeth in The Founder but they don’t look as if they’ll bite – they seem more an emblem of Ray Kroc’s ingratiating mediocrity. At the start of the story, in 1954, Ray is a travelling salesman. His line is milkshake-makers. We see a couple of his unsuccessful sale pitches; when he then phones his wife Ethel (Laura Dern) and tells her he’s getting a lot of interest, Ray can tell from her voice she’s no more convinced than the prospective clients were. Well after he’s hooked up with Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch), Ray retains an underdog quality. The terms of his hurriedly agreed contract with the brothers brings him to the brink of bankruptcy. Ray then meets, by chance, Harry Sonneborn (B J Novak), a financial adviser. Harry transforms more than his bank balance: at this point, Ray turns instantly into a stop-at-nothing capitalist carnivore.
Ray Kroc first gets to know the McDonalds when Dick places an order for eight milkshake machines, an exceptional number by Ray’s standards. He drives all the way from Missouri to San Bernardino, where Dick and Mac run their takeaway diner, and is much impressed by the queues, the lightning-fast service, the quality of the food, the evidently satisfied customers. He sits on a bench outside the diner with a family for whom McDonald’s burgers and fries are clearly a transcendent experience (their rapture is comically overdone). The brothers give Ray a tour of the premises; he takes them out to dinner; they explain how they developed their fast-food recipes and their quick-service technique. Ray learns – in response to his suggestion that they franchise their business – that the McDonalds have already tried to do so and failed, thanks to absentee owners and erratic standards. Once-bitten-twice-shy Dick and Mac are determined to retain quality control of their product. Ray, whose watchword is ‘persistence’, persuades them to let him work on their behalf on a different franchising approach. A contract is drawn up, requiring the brothers’ authorisation of every proposed new franchise arrangement. After a stumbling start, Ray hits on the idea of franchising to midmarket investors: he thinks they, as a group, will be more prepared to be hands-on managers and to respect the original formula. New branches of McDonald’s start up across the Midwest.
On a visit to Minnesota, Ray meets Rollie Smith (Patrick Wilson), a restaurant owner keen to become a franchisee, and is immediately attracted to Smith’s wife Joan (Linda Cardellini). Because Ray suddenly seems more interested in Joan than in talking shop (and Patrick Wilson gives Rollie an eager but suspicious edge), this restaurant sequence is a good deal livelier than Ray’s earlier dinner outing with the McDonalds. That’s no great accomplishment, though. For the first hour of The Founder, John Lee Hancock, working with a screenplay by Robert D Siegel, seems to be going through the motions, except in his direction of Michael Keaton’s performance. The movie perks up in its second half but Hancock, unlike his protagonist, is excessively unprovocative – he’s tentative about vilifying Ray Kroc even after the latter’s abrupt personality change. It could be argued that, while Dick and Mac obviously originated McDonald’s, Kroc was justified in calling himself the ‘founder’ of the enterprise: without him, successful franchising of the brand would never have happened. But the director’s kid gloves seem more a reflection of cautious respect for what McDonald’s has become – the film’s closing legends remind us that it feeds around 68 million people, or 1% of the entire world population, every day. John Lee Hancock’s apparent fair-mindedness might be easier to accept if he’d not shown a similar attitude to Walt Disney and all his works in Saving Mr Banks. At least in that case the Disney name on the production credits was some explanation.
Prior to Saving Mr Banks, Hancock had a major hit with The Blind Side. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her role in that film and The Founder, from the word go, sets out to showcase its main actor. Keaton, in the renaissance of his career over the last couple of years, has starred in consecutive Best Picture winners (Birdman and Spotlight), without getting personal recognition, at the Academy Awards. Ray Kroc’s first pitch is delivered straight to camera. You assume he’s practising his spiel in front of a mirror but Hancock then pulls back to reveal the prospective client being addressed. The artifice increases the temptation of seeing this bit also as Michael Keaton’s opening pitch to the Academy. It’s hardly his fault that, in the event, it’s turned out to be no more persuasive than Kroc is initially. As usual, Keaton is witty: he’s also, physically and temperamentally, the right actor to play a combination of resilient little guy and snake in the grass. When, at the end, Hancock shows footage of the real Ray Kroc (1902-84) it has the effect of making you admire Keaton’s sympathy and restraint. But the script is opaque about significant aspects of Kroc’s personality and motivation, and denies Keaton the opportunities to tell us more – about why, for example, Ray’s first marriage is childless, loveless and eventually just about wordless. Although Laura Dern as Ethel Kroc holds your attention, in her case too the line between character and actor is unfortunately blurred: Ethel’s uncertainty about, and limited interest in, what’s going on seem to reflect Dern’s situation in this film. Ray Kroc eventually proves himself as keen on mergers and acquisitions in his personal life as in his professional one. He breaks up the Smiths’ marriage, divorces Ethel and marries Joan.
23 February 2017