Michael Keaton Owns the Screen in McDonald’s Ray Kroc Biopic ‘The Founder’

Aryeh Harris-Shapiro

Michael Keaton‘s most recent film, “The Founder,” tells the story of Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s fame. Director John Lee Hancock and writer Robert D. Siegel craft a perfect star vehicle for Keaton. It that allows him to chew all the scenery he can handle. However, the film never evolves past that. The story maintains a brisk pace and a sense of humor, but the filmmakers fail to craft an effective structure around Keaton’s performance.

Keaton plays Kroc like a used-car salesman with a feral, desperate edge. His hunger for success and frustration at his own mediocrity are easy to empathize with, and the movie’s first half draws its power from the tension between his identifiable motives and the amoral methods he uses to achieve them. He’s helped in this regard by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch as Dick and Mac McDonald, the original burger men whose Midwestern work ethic and steadfast, small-town morality become the ball and chain around Kroc’s ankle. Scenes that feature all three crackle with energy.

Unfortunately, as the movie goes on, it separates its three best characters more and more. Keaton finds himself stranded alongside Laura Dern and Patrick Wilson, prop characters just there for Kroc to screw over. The brothers become more and more marginalized in their San Bernardino location, a choice dictated by real-life events but unfortunate for the film’s momentum. The tension and conflict leak out of the movie as the McDonald brothers fail to put up any real resistance to Kroc’s coup. What begins as an energetic, lightweight riff on the structure that made “The Social Network” so successful slows to a crawl as Kroc effortlessly betrays one person after another. The sense of struggle crucial to the film’s conception of Kroc vanishes.

The film’s downward slide is a frustrating turn of events, even as it bravely portrays Kroc as a “professional leech” without a single idea of his own but an amoral drive toward success. It was that drive that transformed McDonald’s from a successful local phenomenon into a global juggernaut. He’s a bastard, but he’s also right, and had the film explored that tension to better effect, “The Founder” could have been a powerful exploration of the toxic nature of the American Dream through the lens of one of the country’s most recognizable institutions.

“The Founder” opens nationwide on Jan. 20.