‘The Founder’:
‘The Founder’ gives genuine insight into the calculating and innovative Ray Kroc
Film gives insight into the calculating and innovative Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald’s into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.
“The Founder” is a great American story, but it’s not about a great American. It’s the story of Ray Kroc, a man of real vision, who wasn’t especially nice, but he created something remarkable. He took McDonald’s and turned it into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. He didn’t invent fast food, but he invented the fast-food business.
What makes “The Founder” distinctly American, beyond the setting (California and the Midwest in the 1950s), is that Kroc had that particular type of American drive that measures the worth of one’s entire life in terms of external success. This is not an attitude that crosses all cultures, but Americans certainly understand it, and so we see in Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) a blown-up version of something we recognize within. And we care about him, and sympathize, because at the start of the movie he’s 52 and not a big shot yet. He’s not even close.
It’s 1954, and Ray is still hustling. He gets in his car and drives around trying to sell industrial mixers (for milkshakes, etc.) to restaurants. He has a nice house, but he’s never home, and a wife (Laura Dern) who seems to be living in some ’50s woman’s nightmare: She literally is shown doing nothing but sitting in the house all day, breathing in and breathing out, and occasionally taking nourishment. She lives for dinners at the “club” — the exclusive golf club where the Krocs seem to be the most poverty-stricken members.
His life slowly begins to change course when two restaurant owners, Mac and Dick McDonald, order a half dozen of Ray’s mixers. He goes out to their restaurant — their only restaurant, the first McDonald’s in the world — and he’s amazed. He orders a hamburger, a Coke and French fries, and, lo and behold, within 30 seconds someone hands him a bag with a hamburger, a Coke and French fries. No wait.
Ray Kroc’s inspiration was to franchise McDonald’s restaurants. From the beginning, he understood that this was something that could really go everywhere. His struggle to turn his vision into a reality makes for a fascinating story, not just in terms of the character of Ray Kroc, but as a business saga. Watching it, we can’t help but anticipate the various business challenges and to wonder how he solved them.
For example, quality control. The whole point of fast food is that you can drive 1,000 miles, stop at a McDonald’s, and it will be identical to the McDonald’s you know back home. But if you’re selling franchises, the individual entrepreneurs own the individual McDonald’s restaurants. So how do you keep them from expressing their individuality and creativity by screwing things up? Persuasion isn’t enough. What is the actual leverage to force a McDonald’s owner to toe the line? Kroc — or rather an assistant to Kroc — eventually figures that one out.
Throughout, Ray is in contention with the McDonald brothers, and one of the best features of the movie is that neither side is always right. Sometimes we agree with Ray. Sometimes we agree with Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac ( John Carroll Lynch). The McDonalds are rigorous in their commitment to a quality product, but they’re content to think small. They are decent, ethical guys, but careful — a little too careful. Ray, by contrast, understands how to grow a business, but he says things like, “If my competitor were drowning, I’d put a hose right in his mouth.” Keaton leaves you in no doubt that he means it, literally.
Keaton is fun to watch — fun and a little bit eerie. He plays Ray as all drive and no soul. At the start of the film, Ray is not happy with the life he has led. But then gradually his external reality comes into harmony with his internal sense of grandiosity, and it does not make him a better person. It makes him colder, brusquer, meaner and unyielding, and yet, peeking out from just beneath the surface, he’s gleeful, too. It’s hard to blame him. He has waited so long for this.
It’s a credit both to Keaton and director John Lee Hancock that they resisted making Keaton lovable here. It would have been easy. All he’d have had to do was press a little harder on the manic, on the zany. Instead, Keaton eases up, so that his natural energy is still there, but so are notes of steely calculation.
Notice this particularly in the dinner scene in which he looks across the restaurant and spots a woman who attracts him. Keaton’s expression is practically reptilian. All this guy can think of is what he wants, an advantage and a curse.