The story begins with Ray (Michael Keaton) as a traveling salesman trying to sell milkshake mixers to restaurants. This is his latest "big idea" after countless failures, and it isn't going so well either. Once day, he stumbles onto a San Bernardino, CA restaurant called McDonald's with a revolutionary idea (efficient, fast service). He convince the brothers who run the restaurant, Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch) McDonald, to allow him to oversee franchising. He starts with a few locations in the Midwest, meets a few people along the way who help him turn this into an empire, and eventually muscles the brothers out.
The central question of The Founder is if Ray Croc is the hero or the villain of the story. Croc is a divisive character. Being played by Michael Keaton makes him inherently likable to begin with. Croc is someone who is willing to put in the work, almost to a fault. His great skill, as he's well aware, isn't talent, luck, or intelligence. It's persistence. He's willing to keep working at something until he succeeds, and that's a hard thing to root against. The problem is that he knows that to succeed in his chosen field, he'll need to step on a few throats along the way. He's willing to be civil, but he's also willing to be vicious. He screws over the McDonald brothers only after trying to work with them for a while. He's pretty lousy to his wife, played by Laura Dern, who puts up with a lot of crap from him, but he's direct about wanting to leave her. He's duplicitous, but in a subtle way.
I'm not sure the film does a good enough job answering that central question though about Croc. There's a difference between trying to be objective and refusing to take a stance. Ray Croc is the physical embodiment of "Shit happens". What he does to the McDonald brothers is seen as an inevitability. If it wasn't Croc, it would've been someone else. So, the movie continually pulls back from the hard moments. Croc rarely seems all that conflicted. He just keeps pushing forward, with or without the consent of his business partners. Is the point of the movie that some people are winners and some people are losers? I really don't know. There's more going on than just "this is how McDonald's grew into an empire" though.
Keaton is very good in this. The movie doesn't work at all without him. There's so many ways to play the character that are either too cruel or too dumb. Keaton balances it marvelously. Offerman and Lynch are fine as the McDonald brothers, playing similar to characters we've seen them play before. They want to be in a comedy more than they rest of the movie does, and there's an unintended tension to that which bothered me. I don't know if that blame goes with the performance or the direction. Dern, as Croc's wife, does more complicated work than I expected. She does everything she can to support Ray and it's never enough for him. Just when you think she's on the same page with him, he asks for more. She has the least satisfying exit in the movie. In hindsight, I wonder why they even bothered to include her in the first place. Linda Cardellini, Patrick Wilson, BJ Novak, and others get some mostly unimportant parts. They serve their purposes and not much else.
I think I didn't like The Founder, but the fact that I'm not sure about it makes me wonder if I just didn't like how it made me feel (It's the difference between how I feel about The Judge - awful - and how I feel about Anomalisa - uncomfortable). There's a nihilistic edge to it that I don't know if I'm supposed to celebrate or despise. Director John Lee Hancock doesn't make enough decisions (or consistent enough decisions) to dig into the finer points of the conflict and character. It's a film utterly dominated by Michael Keaton's performance and that alone makes it watchable. On the surface, the script and direction keep things light enough that I really didn't consider if I actually enjoyed the movie until it was over. That's a strange skill that seems to be Hancock's specialty. If nothing else, I can say this much: it's more entertaining than reading the Wikipedia article about Ray Croc.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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