All this film’s irony and ambiguity are showcased in the title, though Birth of a Salesman was an alternative that occurred to me. The Founder is an absorbing and unexpectedly subtle movie about the genesis of the McDonald’s burger empire. There is an avoiding of obviousness that resides in its clever casting of not-immediately-dislikable Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the needy, driven, insecure marketing type with the predatory surname who masterminded a nationwide franchising for the original California hamburger restaurant in the 1950s; finally taking it away from its owners and revolutionary fast-food pioneers, Dick and Mac McDonald, played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch.
Keaton is never the cartoon bad guy, not even at the very end. His moonfaced openness makes him look like a giant, middle-aged baby, wide-eyed with optimism about the world. He looks like the kind of unemployed comedian who might earn a buck playing scary clown Ronald McDonald – who is not in fact mentioned in the film.
The film’s first act is careful to show Kroc sympathetically; screenwriter Robert D Siegel and director John Lee Hancock cleverly set up Ray’s early struggle, his genuine ecstasy on discovering the McDonald brothers and his acumen in seeing the global potential of their little burger joint. And is it so wrong to call him the Founder? After all, the corporate-franchised experience of going into McDonald’s anywhere in the world is what Kroc envisioned and effectively founded. Along the way, the film shows us something about postwar entrepreneurial capitalism, innovation, corporate expansion and intellectual property rights. It even casts an oblique light on the new age of Trump.
Keaton’s Kroc is a hardworking man who’s always on the road, driving from town to town, exasperated by slow and erratic service at the drive-ins where he gets lunch, while his bored wife (a thankless role for Laura Dern) stays at home. Ray is trying to sell restaurant managers a new five-spindled milkshake machine – which makes five times as much as the usual single-spindle model – and crucially sell them on the concept that an increase in supply creates its own demand through market stimulus. The poor guy gets doors slammed in his face all over the country. But not in California, where a couple of bright, cheery brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald, have created an extraordinarily efficient fast-food system in their burger restaurant with no plates, no cutlery, no tedious wait times. They want six or eight of Kroc’s five-spindle milkshake machines. They don’t have to create demand. They’ve already got more than they can handle.
Ray listens to their story and is electrified by their innovative genius and American can-do. He positively insists on setting up a franchise operation for them. Too late, the poor McDonald brothers realise that this pushy fellow has pulled off what might be America’s first corporate takeover.
Like the young Donald Trump, Kroc is a huge fan of self-help and how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people type stuff. Alone in his scuzzy hotel rooms, he listens to a motivational LP which intones the words of Calvin Coolidge: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence, talent will not, nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent …” It was the McDonald brothers who had the talent. Kroc was the one with the persistence. Yet that, after all, is a kind of talent.
Also like Trump, Kroc’s wealth is to be founded on land and real estate, not burgers. He finally understands the importance of buying the land for his franchise outlets. And like Trump, he becomes an early connoisseur of branding and market identity. To the brothers’ astonishment, he takes out a copyright on their solidly reassuring name. And he finally returns to his supply-over-demand theory: America didn’t know it wanted or needed an identikit burger joint until he gave it to them.
Yet for all this, The Founder has a very different effect to, say, Morgan Spurlock’s gonzo documentary Super Size Me from 2004, which set out to show America’s Big Mac habit as nasty and damaging. However bad Kroc’s behaviour in this film, and however poignant the innocence of poor Mac and Dick, the actual customers of the restaurant are never shown as anything other than happy. Perhaps we are invited to see all this as the inevitable, rough business of market forces.
Crucially, Keaton’s Ray does not see himself as a sociopath or a narcissist but as the Capraesque hero of a feelgood underdog drama. He thinks he is the little guy making good. Yet by the end, we have seen quite another side to him.
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