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Jan 20, 2017 By Charles Steinberg Web Exclusive

In The Founder, Michael Keaton continues his run of great roles since his reemergence in Birdman. Now he adopts the superficial charisma of Ray Kroc, the salesman that took McDonald’s from a model of efficiency, take-out burger joint in San Bernardino, California to a universally recognized global franchise. The film’s title is actually a misnomer. Kroc didn’t start McDonald’s but latched onto an idea of Richard and Maurice McDonald, brothers who in the late 1940’s began operating their burger stand like a production assembly line, pioneering a fast food revolution.

The story highlights opportunism, the seizing on to the potential of something not yet fully realized. More suggestively, we’re shown the resultant collateral damage to human trust. Kroc was a hustling milkshake machine salesman when he first did business with the McDonald brothers (played with endearing honesty by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman.) Witnessing the expedience and efficiency of their streamlined food service model, Kroc pounced, selling them on the idea that this was a franchise waiting to happen. Once Kroc convinced the McDonalds to let him expand their enterprise, he never looked back. Framed effectively within the motivational speeches that accompany his pursuits, Kroc sees success as a matter of persistence once opportunities are spotted. Inevitably, ambitious persistence takes a toll on personal relationships and the direct bystanders in this case were the hapless McDonald brothers and Kroc’s neglected wife, played with pitiful reserve by Laura Dern.

Finding a curiously compelling figure from the recent past seems to be the kind of story director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) likes to tell, and The Founder once again navigates the notion of destiny and its plotted course. Hancock approaches this theme through aligning the fortunate events that spurred Kroc’s ascension and eventual takeover. Evidently, that good fortune was often made in morally questionable ways. The big draw is being shown the background of an American cultural institution and the genesis of its astronomical growth. In this way the film fascinates how The Social Network did for the story behind Facebook, and like its central figure Mark Zuckerberg, there are character flaws on display that promote Ray Kroc’s rise. The self-unaware moxie of not taking no for an answer that distinguishes many a successful salesman is colorfully snappy in Keaton’s role play. It works in Kroc’s favor both in getting next to “the man” and subsequently manipulating him out of his standing. Mainly, The Founder is a platform for Keaton’s mimicry and he applies the same energy to ingratiation as he does to calculated elimination without flinching. As his targets, the McDonald brothers can only stand there defenseless. It’s actually a little scary to see such a thin line between admiration and dismissal of worth and Keaton’s performance has you getting behind him in the first half of the film and then wanting to get away from him in the second.

With the impeccably detailed set design, costume design, and astute characterization of the societal and behavioral conventions of the era, The Founder makes for an enhanced historical documentary and a view into the insidiousness of good business.

www.facebook.com/thefounderfilm

Author rating: 7/10