I know few things about business and fewer things about investing. If I wasn’t so careful with my money, I’d guess I’d be a layup for a salesman waiting to outsmart me. A salesman’s job — whether he likes it or not — is to find the most pleasant way of doing just that, and in this sense, he doesn’t try to sell a product as much as he tries to sell a face.
Ray Kroc spent the first half of his life trying to sell both. Unless he had no other option but to make a living doing so, it’s conceivable that he started because he truly believed that laypeople needed what he could provide. He easily surpassed the age and wealth at which he could’ve stopped; it’s certain that he continued because he liked piling up his prizes with the ghosts of charm he could call his own.
His career wasn’t always so blatantly forgiving; the job never is. You’ve heard of the stinger, “I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Kroc could, and did. When his lines didn’t work, they fell back on top of him. He was an actor more than a logistics person, and like a committed performer in a play, he took criticism personally, even when it was admittedly others who dealt his cards. The first shot of The Founder — a fictionalization of how Kroc’s name eventually shimmied its way into the food industry, and the books — intentionally closes in on the face of its subject, played by Michael Keaton, who’s sporting a flowery tie and coat that’s so shamelessly plain that it’s asking to be called scruffy. He’s knee-deep in a preppy sales routine (staged effectively) to win over the potential client, an unseen sandwich shop manager who likely hasn’t met this particular individual before but has almost undoubtedly heard the pitch. It won’t be difficult for the employer to decline Kroc’s offer, but with a shot of intimacy, director John Lee Hancock intends to unload the guilt that the man would have had onto his audience.
And yet, Kroc never completely earned my sympathy during The Founder. The more I trusted Keaton’s character, the less I found myself trusting the film (he is, as I shall put it, not the underdog of the story). Fortunately, it’s how Hancock wants the movie — written by Robert D. Siegel — to work; the script gets less fun and more uncompromising in regards to its protagonistic world-beater in its second half, even if parts of the first are one notch above a cookie-cutter mold and two above outright commercialism. In other words, The Founder is the most successful when it’s less about the golden arches of McDonald’s — the franchise that Kroc went on to champion to the direct chagrin of few and the indirect delight of many — and more about the guy with his hands on his hips on the poster. My best guess, however, is that you’ll find something to admire about it on the whole, even if you’re like me and don’t give two rips about the Big Mac.
The sooner you get away from the title, the better. The Founder argues the irony of its own namesake in the fact that Kroc did not technically found much of anything. He quite bluntly rode off the ingenuity of the McDonald brothers, and no, I didn’t know that McDonald’s was named after an actual surname either. Maurice McDonald is played by John Carroll Lynch, who I will never picture the same way again after watching Zodiac too late on one scarring night. Side note. Lynch, of course, is an entirely different identity here, an emotionally soft entrepreneur who’s quickly losing his dreams of riches to his degrading health. Richard (Nick Offerman), the realist of the two, wants to pour his brother’s efforts into what they already have going; their drive-in (the one that started them all) is a tiny joint but a booming one, stationed in sunny, smiley San Bernardino. They could always use a little more money, but they’re attracting kids and families, and McDonald’s — of which, at this point, there is approximately one, in addition to some failed attempts at duplicates in other southwest locations — is a respectable name to the civilians it services.
Kroc tells them that he wants to help the business out, which really means that he wants to take it. The game is to expand, particularly into the north side of Chicago (Waukegan makes a special appearance). He earns just enough of the brothers’ trust as an administrator to wedge himself between them and the drawing boards, then slowly chips away at their control — and profits. First comes the small stuff, the delivery of which is humorous and draws out a gravitational imbalance within the two parties; Richard doesn’t want a basement in the new Des Plaines branch because he’s afraid customers will fall through the floor; Kroc fumes over another outlet’s gall to put lettuce on their hamburgers (in his mind, the menu should have about the flexibility of the Billy Goat Tavern from SNL).
Creativity can never seem to beat out the corporation, and more sinister power struggles arise between Kroc and the original owners of McDonald’s. We see Keaton strive (and stumble) through a lot to get what his ambitious eyes are set on; he personally picks up trash scattered in front of various of his restaurants; his friends openly laugh at him at dinner parties; his marriage is further paralyzed the less time he spends at home with his wife, played with charisma by a believable Laura Dern in a film whose cast would be nearly entirely men without her.
Hancock pays Kroc his dues concerning what he did to get himself a desk, but for a while, the director doesn’t ponder in advance what his screen incarnation plans to do with his reward. Keaton expertly wears greed as a mask, even though it begs to be released by the script. The levee eventually breaks, and unlike with the director’s previous work The Blind Side, he analyzes the main figure of the narrative through more aged, perceptive eyes. The Founder is momentarily critical, but not unfair. I will leave you to determine if Kroc resides in your good graces by the movie’s finale, which includes a borderline cruel epilogue conversation between him and Richard in the restroom (hint: it’s after a meeting with lawyers).
You could argue that, in the end, Kroc deserved the rights to the brand. Where he once dragged his suitcase from door to door, he found his niche hopping from office to office, factory to factory, CEO to CEO. He also legally owned the name of the company; it’s debatable, however, whether the same was true on moral grounds. The more he read “McDonald’s” aloud, the more it became his — the voice that he held truest was his own.
Reading through it once more, I realize that much of this review is expository, but maybe I thought up all these things because The Founder was just that watchable. The last time I discussed it with him, my grandfather was itching to see the film. He’s loved Kroc for much of his life, mostly for his charity work and surely not for anything he’s seen doing in the last twenty minutes of this movie. Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect these twenty minutes to reverse an opinion of more than three decades; then again, it would be even more unreasonable to expect McDonald’s to possess anything less in ten years than it has now, which is as close to global domination as any restaurant will ever get.
