Film review

  • The Founder

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Hidden Figures

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Theodore Melfi (2016)

    Hidden Figures is a crowd-pleaser and the box-office figures give an idea of the magnitude of the crowds being pleased:  the picture, which cost $25m to make, has taken $171.3m worldwide in the two months since it opened in the US.  Theodore Melfi’s second feature (his first was the modest St Vincent in 2014) is broad, unsubtle and a thoroughly deserved popular success.  The screenplay by Melfi and Allison Schroeder is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly.  Hidden Figures combines two differently stirring headline stories of the 1960s, African-American Civil Rights and the Space Race:  it’s hardly surprising that the film rights were snapped up several months before Shetterly’s book was published (by which time the movie was nearing completion).  The clever title is a pun; the title characters are black women mathematicians, employed by NASA at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.  (Margot Lee Shetterly, who is African-American, was born in Hampton in 1969.  Her mother was a professor of English at Hampton University, an historically black institution.  Her father worked as a research scientist at the Langley Center.)

    The film focuses on three individuals who, at the start, all work in Langley’s segregated ‘West Area’ computers division:  Katherine Goble, a mathematical prodigy; Mary Jackson, who wants to be an engineer; and Dorothy Vaughan, the division’s de facto supervisor, though she’s not officially recognised or paid as such.  The action is set in 1961 and early 1962, against the background of increasing pressure on NASA scientists in the light of Soviet space successes that culminate in Yuri Gagarin’s orbiting Earth in April 1961.  Katherine (Taraji P Henson) is temporarily assigned as a ‘computer’ to the ‘Space Task’ group, headed by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner).  Mary (Janelle Monáe) is sent to work with a group of engineers.  In both cases, all their scientist colleagues are white males – although Karl Zielinski (Olek Krupa), a Jewish concentration camp survivor, suggests to Mary, by way of encouragement, that he’s as much an against-the-odds member of the engineering team as she is.  Back in the West Area, Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) learns of the impending installation of an electronic computer and realises machines of this kind could make her and her colleagues redundant.  She teaches herself then trains the other West Area staff in the use of FORTRAN.   The climax to Hidden Figures is the Mercury-Atlas 6 (MA-6) spaceflight of 20 February 1962, in which John Glenn became the first US astronaut to orbit Earth.  By now, Katherine, no longer required, has returned to West Division.  Minutes before lift-off, discrepancies in calculations of the space capsule’s landing co-ordinates cause Glenn (Glen Powell), who’s met and been impressed by Katherine at earlier stages of planning for Project Mercury, to request that she be asked to resolve the discrepancies.  She does so but, after a successful launch, a problem with the capsule’s heat shield develops.  Katherine’s spot-on advice on what to do next ensures that John Glenn survives re-entry and lands safely in the ocean.

    According to Wikipedia, Glenn did specifically ask that Katherine Johnson verify the computer calculations for his historic spaceflight but ‘she had several days before the launch date to complete the process’.  This is a hint of how shamelessly free with the historical facts Hidden Figures is (again according to Wikipedia) – in order to intensify the drama and the racial issues involved.  Attentive viewers will notice from the film’s closing legends that Theodore Melfi has also bent the facts of the women’s personal lives to engineer a more immediately engaging storyline.  In the movie, the widowed Katherine has a whirlwind romance with James Johnson (Mahershala Ali), a National Guard officer, and marries him; the epilogue tells us that Katherine Goble Johnson, who is now ninety-eight, has been married to James Johnson for fifty-six years.  On the basis of what Melfi has shown previously, this is a chronological impossibility – but the Johnsons actually married in 1959, two years before they first meet on screen.  That’s a very minor fiddling of facts beside the film’s account of the heroines’ professional lives[1].  How much does such falsification matter?

    Watching Hidden Figures soon after La La Land and Hacksaw Ridge was a salutary reminder of how subjectively one reacts to a director who blatantly works the audience.  I sometimes pretend I simply don’t like films in which this happens but I know I’m not being honest.  Theodore Melfi is as obviously manipulative – shaping the material to generate a particular response from the viewer – as Damien Chazelle or Mel Gibson.  Yet not only was I swept up by Melfi’s movie; I didn’t try to resist and didn’t resent what he was doing.  I think there are two reasons for this.  The less positive reason is that the manipulation at work in Hidden Figures, compared with that of La La Land, seems unsophisticated.  Melfi switches back and forth, and schematically, to tell the women’s stories, which take the form of a series of advances towards self-fulfilment and liberation – always achieved through their being determined and smart.  Even when they’re on the receiving end of racism or sexism, Katherine, Mary and Dorothy always have a sharp putdown:  as well as embodying the overarching moral argument, they win each mini-argument along the way.  The more positive reason is that the Civil Rights motor of these stories makes them not only compelling but in essence truthful.  Whereas Mel Gibson in Hacksaw Ridge exploits his hero’s commitment to non-violence to deliver a startlingly violent war movie, you never feel that Theodore Melfi is exploiting the racial injustice theme in a way that fundamentally distorts it.   

    Because the discrimination and segregation that Hidden Figures describes is inherently incensing, you always hope that Melfi (who’s white) won’t push it too hard.  On the whole, he doesn’t.  Some of the less obviously dramatic instances are particularly incisive:  Katherine’s discovery that the other members of the Space Task group have introduced an apartheid system for office refreshments, with jars of coffee labelled ‘white’ and ‘coloured’;  a librarian (Rhoda Griffis) who takes Dorothy to task for straying into the ‘white books’ section.  There are seriocomic examples of one form of prejudice confounding another.  At the start, Mary, Katherine and Dorothy, on the way to work, are pulled over by a traffic policeman (Ron Clinton Smith):  he forgives them for being black and female when he learns they’re employed doing what he sees as anti-Soviet work.  Mary wins the legal right to attend engineering night school classes at an historically whites-only college and arrives for the first lecture; the discomfited male professor (Michael Hartson) suggests to her that the syllabus isn’t designed for women.

    Melfi does well to avoid suggesting that an act of recognition signals a conclusive, race-equality breakthrough:  as Katherine prepares to return to the West Area, Al Harrison’s PA Ruth (Kimberly Quinn) presents her with a wedding present on behalf of the Space Task group – a pearl necklace, part of the uniform of white women at Langley.  There’s a dutiful chill in Ruth’s affable manner as she presents the gift.  Katherine’s high-speed, long-distance journeys from the Space Task group building to the nearest ‘coloured’ toilet in West Area are milked, though Melfi gets some tonal variety into them.  Her big outburst when Harrison loses patience and demands to know where Katherine disappears to every day is delivered too deliberately:  it needs to come out more unthinkingly, more unstoppably.  The follow-up sequence, in which Harrison takes a jemmy to a metal toilet sign and declares all bathrooms open to all ethnic groups, is effective as a partly comic image – a white-collar scientist driven to effortful manual work.  Melfi detracts from this with the accompaniment of the movie’s standard-issue inspirational music (by Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams and Benjamin Wallfisch).  Katherine is repeatedly shown standing in physical isolation from her white co-workers.  These shots are more eloquent than the emphatic ones of doors literally shutting in her face.

    Taraji P Henson defines Katherine’s character strongly and clearly.   She isn’t fluid moving from one mood to another but she’s highly likeable.  Compared with both Katherine and Dorothy, Mary is an underwritten character and Janelle Monáe, though she’s proficient, plays her obviously (Monáe is better in Moonlight).  The role of Mary’s Civil Rights activist husband (Aldis Hodge) is perfunctory too.  Octavia Spencer gives a performance of maturity and authority as Dorothy.  When the snotty white supervisor Vivian Mitchell insists that ‘Despite what you may think, I have nothing against y’all’, Spencer achieves dramatic and comic impact through her quiet delivery of the reply:  ‘I know.  I know you probably believe that’.  Kirsten Dunst, a surprising choice to play Vivian, is very effective.  Although Colonel Johnson is an unremarkable part, Mahershala Ali, as in Moonlight, lights up the screen from the moment he appears. (His physical resemblance to Linford Christie is even more striking here.)  Ali’s imposing appearance is leavened by embarrassment in an early conversation with Katherine in which Johnson makes a chauvinist fool of himself, and by humorous charm in the delightful scene in which he proposes marriage.   Kevin Costner is alert, precise and altogether excellent as Al Harrison.  He’s convincing, it must be said, as a man with more paunch than gravitas – and in apparently failing to inspire his troops in the desperate pep talk that follows Gagarin’s space flight.  As a combination of professional competence and limited imagination, Costner’s Harrison is very credible.  Glen Powell is an appealing, though very young, John Glenn (Powell is twenty-eight, Glenn was forty in 1961).  Glenn enjoyed a long, successful and pretty honourable public life in politics after his astronaut career ended.  He died last December, aged ninety-five, just a few days before Hidden Figures opened.  In conjunction with Katherine Goble Johnson’s remarkable longevity and standing, Glenn’s life and recent death boost the film as a celebration of real-life American heroism.

    Theodore Melfi handles his big cast well, not least in dissuading actors who are mouthpieces for racism and misogyny from moral commentary at the expense of characterisation.  This happens even when Melfi’s and Allison Schroeder’s writing of the parts in question seems to dictate crude playing.  Paul Stafford, the touchy and egotistical head engineer who refuses to let Katherine’s name appear as his co-author on reports which she’s largely produced, is much less crude a baddie than he might be, thanks to James Parsons, who plays him.  Frank Hoyt Taylor, as the judge who hears Mary’s plea to enrol for engineering studies, is also better than his role.  No one in this film perpetrates the kind of smug, look-how-nasty-people-like-this-were-in-those-days number that we get from Jack Davenport in A United Kingdom, for example.   Melfi makes liberal use throughout of news film of the period and this seems right – an explicit recognition of how the audience (or people of my and older generations at least) naturally perceive the history of Civil Rights and the Space Race.  In a lighter vein, the sheer incomprehensibility of Katherine’s lightning calculations is always enjoyable.  Hidden Figures begins with a mechanical prologue illustrating the phenomenal mathematical gifts of the child Katherine (Lidya Jewett); this is followed by the encounter between the heroines and the white traffic cop.   These sequences are agreeable enough but you wonder how Theodore Melfi is going to keep things going for another two hours.  You soon realise that the story and his button-pushing approach to telling it will see Melfi through.  In the event, the themes and the acting do more than that: by halfway, Hidden Figures has become utterly absorbing entertainment.  It stays that way to the end.

    22 February 2017

    [1] Further details are in the ‘Historical Accuracy’ section of the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Production

     

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