McHUCKSTER
MICHAEL KEATON CONTINUES HIS LATE- CAREER RESURGENCE AS RAY KROC IN THE FOUNDER.
After the obligatory “based on a true story” screen credit, Michael Keaton’s sombre, lined, 65-year-old mug fills the screen. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, apparently to you, the viewer. “’ What the heck do I need a five-spindle for, when I barely sell enough milkshakes to justify my single spindle?’ Right? Wrong! Are you familiar with the notion of the chicken and the egg?”
And he’s off and running. The Founder is the story of a holy huckster in search of a religion he can sell to the masses. Ray Kroc is hawking milkshake machines in 1954 middle America. When he gets an order from the west coast he decides to drive out Route 66 and see who would request six of these beasts when most days he can’t move even one.
What he finds will look familiar if you live on Earth; a redand- yellow burgers- and- fries joint whose product comes across the counter in a paper bag. But to see him sitting on a bench in the parking lot, exploring this new cuisine, he looks like a man who just stepped into the future. And with messianic zeal, he decides to bring that future to the rest of us.
The restaurant is owned by Dick McDonald ( Nick Offerman, an actor so gloriously low-key he’s off the deep end of the piano) and his brother, Mac (John Carroll Lynch). As written by Robert D. Siegel ( The Wrestler), Mac is the talker and Dick the thinker. With computerlike efficiency, he’s figured out a way to do for food what Henry Ford did for cars — standardize, mechanize and automate. His result: One perfect food stand. “And that’s all there will ever be.” Would you like irony with that?
Ray badgers the McDonalds into a business deal, then heads home to Illinois to start franchising the heck out of the brand. At this point — and indeed, for most of the movie — he won’t strike you as a bad man. A little hot- headed, maybe, but admirably driven and passionate. “We’ll make him listen,” Mac tells his brother, the way you might convince yourself that your newborn is going to sleep through the night.
Hard- drinking without ever seeming drunk, Ray has a his- tory of bad business ideas ( the Fold- a- Nook?), and an appealing innocence when he prays to the gods of entrepreneurship to let him “just be right one time.” The fast-food plan doesn’t start out well; he learns the hard way that hard- luck couples make better franchisees than wealthy retirees, because they’re motivated to succeed.
But along the way greed gets the better of him. Or maybe it was always thus, and he just never had enough money to play the part. In either case, Ray longsuffering wife (Laura Dern) suffers even more, while Ray meets a financial Mephistopheles (B. J. Novak) who suggests a new way of doing business.
Director John Lee Hancock ( The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) gives the film a great sense of rushing forward and of building momentum, not unlike the restaurant chain itself. And he doesn’t play his cards too soon; an extended sequence in which a wealthy restaurateur ( Patrick Wilson) and his wife ( Linda Cardellini) approach Ray about a franchise had me uncertain who ( anyone? everyone?) was wooing whom.
But it’s Keaton, building on the late- career success of Spotlight and Birdman — and did you catch his supporting role in 2014’s RoboCop? — who brings the movie home. The flutter of emotions across his face at odd moments in the action happens too quickly to name them all, but the cumulative effect is beyond words. As Ray Kroc, he is excited, and excitable; irritated and irritating; wounded and bullying. The McDonald brothers look a little like Bob and Harvey Weinstein (whose company is distributing the film in the U. S.), and sometimes Ray acts like them.
Ray is also, like the best cinematic antiheroes, someone you root for past the point where it is wise, or even healthy, to do so. Here’s a guy who could sell you a five- spindle mixer, then offer to supersize your meal and sell you an apple pie, and you’d be powerless but to answer: Yes. ΩΩΩ ½