What were the consequences of the founding of McDonald’s? The problem with “The Founder,” John Lee Hancock’s vigorous but blinkered drama about Ray Kroc’s expansion of the company from a single hamburger stand into a national behemoth, is that it never asks. The movie remains resolutely active, never pausing to examine the effects of fast food’s sudden ubiquity on the national diet, the environment, the economy, or national psychology. It’s an inside-business movie, and it tells the story of the business with a wealth of fascinating—and appalling—details. But it offers no sense of the wider implications of the spread of the franchise, no sense of what it has meant to the world, and no sense of what it means to the characters in the story—not even to Kroc himself.
The story that’s told—based on a script by Robert Siegel—is engaging and, at moments, inspiring, even as it suggests the shaky moral foundations upon which the McDonald’s expansion was built. The story has a bitter irony embedded in its title: Ray Kroc wasn’t the founder of McDonald’s; the McDonald brothers were, and they ran the business until Kroc, turning it into an empire, wrested it away from them. Yet the way that Hancock tells the story, with Kroc at its center, is an enduring reminder that there’s no such thing as “the story”—that its omissions and elisions are the result not of natural narrative contours but of open choices, gaping holes, psychological wounds that a filmmaker displays all the more via the elaborate efforts at concealment in the swiftness, vigor, and focus of its drama.
What’s all the more fascinating about “The Founder” is how it reflects the obsessive focus of Hancock’s own relatively brief career. His breakthrough film, “The Blind Side,” its successor, “Saving Mr. Banks,” and now “The Founder” are united by the same idea: the discovery of latent value through insistent, forceful intervention. In “The Blind Side,” it’s the athletic skill of Michael Oher that’s detected and fostered by his new guardian, Leigh Anne Tuohy; in “Saving Mr. Banks,” it’s Walt Disney’s understanding and realization of the cinematic potential of P. L. Travers’s books about Mary Poppins. In “The Founder,” Kroc (played with heated exuberance by Michael Keaton) recognizes the latent value in the McDonald brothers’ hamburger stand with the force of a religious vision.
The action begins in 1954, when Kroc, an Illinois salesman of multi-spindle milkshake mixers, lugs the heavy device from town to town and from restaurant to restaurant in the hope of drumming up business. He’s on the road, spending many nights away from home (to the distress of his wife, Ethel, played by Laura Dern) and struggling to make a living. Kroc has been struggling for decades, seeking to launch products and businesses that haven’t panned out, losing the money of well-heeled local investors from their social set. Hancock displays the hardscrabble lot of the travelling salesman, with phone calls to the home office made at parking-lot pay phones and lonely nights in shabby hotels. But Kroc is driven, travelling with a portable record player on which he sometimes listens to the speeches of a motivational writer, which inculcate him with faith in effort.
The story pivots on an impulsive decision: hearing from his secretary about an unsolicited order for six mixers from a San Bernardino burger stand, Kroc calls the customer, who impulsively ups the order to eight. Kroc’s curiosity is piqued, and he drives, on the spur of the moment, to California to see for himself what distinguishes this booming restaurant from the ones to which he struggles to sell a single blender. This stand, of course, is the McDonald brothers’. McDonald’s, which has lines at its windows in broad daylight, baffles Kroc: How is the food ready instantly? Where is the crockery and silverware? Where is the food to be eaten? The very notion of fast food is presented as a conceptual shift—one that’s all the more surprising in that it didn’t result in any sacrifice of quality. When one of the McDonald brothers approaches Kroc to ask about the hamburger, he says it’s the best he’s ever eaten.
Intrigued by what he sees, Kroc asks the brothers—Mac (John Carroll Lynch), the glad-handing front man, and Dick (Nick Offerman), the taciturn inventor and manager—to dinner to learn about their operation. In an amazing scene, the brothers’ backstory is unfolded in flashbacks over that pivotal meal. Seeking to distinguish their own hamburger stand from the unsavory, disorderly, teen-centered atmosphere of the competition, and to create one that’s more family-friendly, they (under Dick’s vision) created a minimalist stand, eliminating waitstaff and replacing dishware with disposable paper wrapping. They pared the menu down to the essentials of hamburgers, fries, and shakes, and came up with a Taylorized version of an industrial kitchen to turn them out via mass production—while maintaining their own high standards for quality.
Hancock realizes these scenes, of the McDonalds’ ideas coming to life, with an imaginative verve involving clever effects. The most striking part of the sequence shows Dick commandeering a tennis court, mocking up the kitchen layout in chalk, and—stopwatch in hand—putting a small army of teen-agers through the repeated paces of negotiating its contours. (It’s the second new release to feature such a schematic scene—a crucial moment in “Patriots Day” involves a police officer walking through a cement-floor schematic map of Boston to retrace the attackers’ steps.)
The best thing in “The Founder” is the visual and emotional energy with which the concepts of business are dramatized. Kroc recognizes instantly that the schema of the original McDonald’s can be replicated infinitely, that it’s a virtual template for franchising—but the brothers aren’t interested. They don’t want to lose control of their name and what it stands for—not merely the efficient delivery of food but the quality of the food. Essentially, they were passionate about hamburgers, whereas Kroc was passionate about business, and that difference provides the conflict on which the movie’s drama runs.
Kroc summons his full panoply of sales skills in the hope of persuading the brothers to let him in and start selling franchises. But in the movie’s one truly thrilling scene—a documentary-centered one—Kroc’s hucksterism peels away to reveal a visionary core of inspiration. On the road, Kroc looks out the window of his car, and Hancock shows what Kroc sees—a series of roof lines of classic and venerable small-town American buildings, church steeples, and other calmly majestic structures. The brief but striking sequence is an architectural symphony. When he meets with the McDonalds, he explains that every town has a church and a courthouse, a cross and a flag, and that, with franchising, every town will also have a third icon: the golden arches, a symbol of family.
So the expansion begins, with the McDonald brothers maintaining ironclad control over the franchises. But Kroc finds that their control constrains his ability to do business. Unwilling to take no for an answer, he browbeats the brothers, then does end runs around their authority, then essentially bullies them into submission, and—in an ultimate perfidy—screws them out of millions of dollars and their personal legacy. The movie turns ugly, and the development of the McDonald’s empire comes off as the embodiment of a dream turned sour, of a grand vision corrupted by the will to power.
Much of “The Founder” deals in the dramatization of abstractions. In the most notable dramatic moment in the movie, Kroc is visited by another brilliant businessman, played by B. J. Novak, who shocks him by identifying untapped value in his franchising enterprise, exactly as Kroc did with the single McDonald’s stand. Novak infuses the role with an electrifying mental energy; it’s an exquisite, though brief, supporting performance.
Here and elsewhere, Hancock transforms the questions that inevitably arise from the chain’s growth into marks of temperament, character, and psychology. But in so doing he keeps the politics and the practicalities of the story concealed. The one social issue that Hancock conspicuously avoids—precisely by addressing it with a symbolic wink—is that of race. “The Founder” is notable for its conspicuous and relentless whiteness, which is made all the more apparent by a moment, early in the film, when Kroc gets on the long line at the San Bernardino stand. The woman in front of him (Jacinte Blankenship), a black woman, assures him that the line moves quickly. It’s the one piece of dialogue that’s spoken by a black person, and her presence in the movie masks a much larger and more troubling absence. The issue of whether Kroc’s daily business put him into contact with black people is no mere matter of symbolism; it evokes the most pressing historical question of the time, one that the movie should have addressed. Whether McDonald’s employed black workers and managers in its franchises in the nineteen-fifties, whether the company sold franchises to black people, whether it stood up to the endemic discrimination of the time or participated in them: none of these things are addressed in the movie at all, and their absence reflects Hancock’s larger failure to examine how McDonald’s fit into American culture, and what consequences it had.
The omission of the question of discrimination is all the more conspicuous because it’s the very question that “The Founder” builds, with yet another fine ironic twist, into Kroc’s founding vision. His effort to associate the restaurant chain with the cross (only one religion among many) and the flag (one nation among many) and, for that matter, with the very name of McDonald (which has, he says, an instantly familiar appeal that contrasts with the rough foreignness of his own name) suggests a non-inclusive dream of faux universality that’s misguided from the start.
