THE FOUNDER

"Questa la definirei un'intuizione geniale" tuona decisa la voice over mentre come musica di sottofondo lo accompagna uno sfrigolio ammiccante. E l'ammiccamento è presto detto. Trattandosi della vera storia del fondatore, ma forse dovremmo dire del re, anzi, dell'imperatore dei 'defraudatori di brevetti', del McDonald's, lo sfrigolio ne è per così dire l'anima. Ma... tempo al tempo. Il The Founder di John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr Banks) è una storia lunga e tortuosa e... diciamolo pure fuori dai denti, una brutta storia. La brutta storia di una brutta persona, anche se ha fondato un impero su un hamburger. Anche se ha costruito quell'impero dal niente. Il nome McDonald's suona bene, sa di America. E' vero. Peccato però che non sia il suo. Il logo con quegli archi dorati è fantastico. Peccato però che non sia il suo. L'hamburger con patatine fritte il piatto forte servito con efficienza

e qualità garantita. Peccato che non sia un'idea sua. L'idea di fondo, resa operativa in un chiosco a conduzione familiare, nel cuore della California del Sud, è dei fratelli Mac e Dick McDonald. Gli stessi fratelli anche loro venuti su dal niente dopo vari tentativi e che di lì a poco si ritrovano a siglare un contratto in società con Ray Kroc per ampliare il loro circoscritto business. E' così che, in men che non si dica, si vedono scippati della loro stessa impresa. Ora, va bene l'ambizione, va bene la competizione, ma questa è una vera e propria guerra all'ultimo sangue senza scrupoli di sorta: del genere "cane contro cane" o, ancora meglio, "ratto contro ratto", come dirà di lì a poco lo straordinario interprete Michael Keaton tradotto in Ray Kroc. Perché Ray Kroc è uno che ti lavora ai fianchi come nessun altro, con un'avidità famelica senza pari,

e non tollera intralci alla sua inarrestabile 'moltiplicazione dei pani e dei pesci'. Costi quel che costi.

"So a cosa sta pensando". Sguardo dritto in macchina, dà il via ad un lungo ed intenso piano sequenza prima che si allarghi il campo sul suo interlocutore. E' un avvio umoristico con stile. Come i regolari fallimenti nella vendita 'porta a porta' dei frullatori multimixer per frappé a bar e vari locali di ristorazione, compresi i tipici drive in americani, dove ragazze sui pattini consegnano direttamente ai consumatori seduti comodamente nelle loro auto i primi fast-food. Peccato che i tempi di consegna siano così lunghi e che l'ordinazione arrivi non di rado sbagliata. Sono gli anni Cinquanta, per l'esattezza corre l'anno 1954, e Ray Kroc segue un corso sul pensiero positivo ascoltando da un disco in vinile per non soccombere sotto i colpi bassi dello scoraggiamento. In quel momento, l'unica parola che

riesce a far breccia nella mente dell'infaticabile e frustrato Ray Kroc è "perseveranza". L'unica ancora di salvezza cui aggrapparsi per sopravvivere, giacché non è tanto il talento, e neppure una questione di istruzione - "il mondo è pieno di cretini istruiti" - quanto, appunto, la "perseveranza", l'unica cosa al mondo che conti veramente perché "E' dentro di te che costruisci il tuo futuro". Così pensare in grande diventerà il suo inarrestabile motto. Asfaltare tutto ciò che considera d'intralcio la mossa strategica di ordinaria amministrazione. Sul filo del tragicomico, come Ray Kroc si mette all'opera succhiando la linfa vitale del prossimo per crescere economicamente ed avere quel successo tanto agognato, diventa il cuore del film, a tratti un pò esasperante, a dispetto dell'indiscussa bravura dell'interprete tradotto nello squalo affabulatore Ray Kroc, l'asso piglia tutto, non senza macchiarsi del peccato di baro.

Che tutte le rimostranze avanzate timidamente dalla dimessa e fin

troppo arrendevole moglie Ethel (Laura Dern) non andassero a buon fine ce lo eravamo immaginato. Ma come più tardi il rampante carrierista votato anima e corpo all'impresa ormai lanciata soppianti su due piedi la prima moglie - ennesimo intralcio da asfaltare - è un qualcosa che non vi dovete perdere. Ed è anche l'autentica misera misura di quella persona, 'resuscitata' per pochi minuti dal grande schermo alla fine del film - i miracoli del cinema! - per testimoniare la veridicità della sua storia, stralci della sua vera storia e del suo vero pensiero. Una conferma - purtroppo per lui, pace all'anima sua! - del genere di sanguisuga che è stato e dello sconvolgente percorso che lo ha fatto approdare a tanto. E' suo il pensiero di un'economia vista e sentita come una guerra. Ed è sua l'espressione della messa in pratica. Come un combattimento del genere, appunto, "cane contro cane"

o, per meglio dire - parole sue! - "ratto contro ratto".

John Lee Hancock's knowingly mistitled biopic of McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc proves an unexpectedly piquant moral parable for the Trump era.

Any habitual McDonald’s diner knows that their burgers are nothing without the pickle. The nominal beef patty tastes more like an evocation of meat than an honest slab of steer, and there’s no secret weapon in that cheap, cotton-wool bun. But it’s those two sharp, green slices of vinegary tang, set in relief by a sweet smear of ketchup, that really contain all the brand’s essential flavor. By the same token, it’s the dash of pickle in Robert Siegel’s script — a streak of sour, cheek-puckering cynicism amid its warmer, blander conventions — that gives “The Founder” its mojo. A ruefully titled biopic of Ray Kroc — the man who didn’t found McDonald’s but ruthlessly made it what it is — John Lee Hancock’s glowingly crafted, smartly acted

film largely holds the cheese. It spins a classical tale of underdog entrepreneurship and American Dream-chasing with one eccentric twist: Its chief hero and villain are the same person.

Whether audiences will respond en masse to a film that slides so much corrosive irony beneath its gleaming, awards-season veneer remains to be seen. Not since “Steve Jobs” has such a bright prestige spotlight been granted to such a nakedly venal protagonist, played by Michael Keaton with an easy, puppy-eating grin and unhinged salesman’s patter that makes his narcissistically self-pitying character from “Birdman” look positively cuddly by comparison.

Indeed, perhaps more than its makers could have known at the time of production, “The Founder” plays very much as a period piece for the immediate political present: a fable of vast self-made success gained at the expense of truth and integrity. In an America bitterly divided by its new president-elect, some viewers may well

see Kroc’s story as inspiring; others will view it as positively nihilistic. That implicit moral tension, combined with a fascinating but distinctly niche focus on business strategy and property law, makes this an unexpected, commercially unpredictable digression from the helmer of such soft-centered biographical dramas as “Saving Mr. Banks” and “The Blind Side,” even as it shares their outward trappings of wholegrain populism. Cinematographer John Schwartzman, for starters, lights proceedings with a sunny, advertorial evenness that belies the friction beneath, though a deft, mischievous score by Carter Burwell clues us in earlier, signaling discord through low, brooding jazz motifs and antsy military percussion.

This is less surprising material, however, for Siegel, whose finely scaled scripts for “The Wrestler” and “Big Fan” likewise probed the bleak flipside of a quintessentially American will to win — the difference being that “The Founder” examines the spoils (in all senses of the word) of victory

rather than defeat. “Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful men with talent,” we are told at two points in the film: toward the beginning, in 1954, on a hoary motivational LP played incessantly by Kroc in his days as a frustrated milkshake-mixer salesman, and toward the end, two decades later, appropriated wholesale into a speech where the now-minted mogul outlines the secret of his success. It’s a nifty screenwriting pretzel, encapsulating our protagonist’s belief that no idea is too big or too good to be stolen: Talent is less important than knowing what to do with it, even (or perhaps especially) if the talent in question isn’t your own.

An alternative draft of “The Founder” could have centered on the fast-food empire’s actual, well, founders: Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman, visually and vocally fashioned as a mid-century relative of Ron Swanson from “Parks and Recreation”) and his more retiring

brother, Maurice (John Carroll Lynch), who opened their first highly innovative burger joint in post-WWII San Bernardino, Calif. Siegel and Hancock frame the brothers’ obstacle-ridden backstory as a kind of condensed film-within-a-film, narrated over the course of a dinner meeting with an enraptured Kroc — who has driven all the way west from his Illinois base to meet them, acting on a hunch that there’s gold in them thar grills.

Content with the humming success of their personally supervised restaurant, and deterred from franchising by a fear of compromised standards, the original McDonalds believe their story has reached its happy ending. Little do they know that it’s a mere first act, with Kroc as its Faustian pivot. Convinced that the unprecedented speed and simplicity of their service model has the potential to go countrywide, the silver-tongued out-of-towner wheedles his way into a business partnership, overseeing the establishment of further McDonald’s branches

far from California — and, crucially, out of earshot of the brothers, who only clock the extent to which Kroc has claimed and colonized their brand when it’s too late to stop the bandwagon.

“Business is war,” Kroc states drily. The battle lines are clearly drawn, as he and the increasingly disenfranchised (so to speak) brothers verbally fire shots and burn bridges in one brisk phone conversation after another — edited in terse, talky, unabashedly repetitious style by regular Nicole Holofcener collaborator Robert Frazen. It’s not the stuff of searing cinematic drama, yet the ethical and philosophical complexities of their dispute prove peculiarly gripping. Just whose side, if either, are the filmmakers on? The McDonalds hold all the moral cards, yet Siegel’s script holds them at a cool distance from us; it’s Kroc’s calculating head we’re invited to enter, as the film finds a perverse sympathy in his long-stymied desperation to

be a part, and finally a possessor, of something wholly successful.

“You and your endless parade of nos, cowering in the face of progress,” he spits over the phone as the elder McDonald rejects his latest cost-saving proposal — this time a new form of powdered milkshake that perfectly symbolizes his commitment to productivity over principle. The compelling quandary of “The Founder” is that he’s at once in the wrong and wholly correct — and that McDonald’s would never have become one of the great American institutions without his grossly toxic intervention. (Don’t expect any promotional tie-ins, incidentally, for a film that shows a global corporate superpower to be built on an act of theft.)

Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision. Yet his strongest scenes may be

the aching, awkward glimpses into his home life with resignedly neglected wife Ethel (a fine Laura Dern, all the more poignant for being underused) in which we see how impossible it is for him to simply be a respectable working man: The too-wide spaces and too-long silences between them are consumed with his inchoate yearning for something greater. Daniel Orlandi’s typically pristine costume design emasculates Kroc in this aim throughout, consistently boxing him into unformidable suits in shades of tan and bodily function brown — as well as one yellow gingham short-sleeved shirt that wittily presages generations of burger-flipper uniforms to come.

A carefully chosen ensemble bolsters this rivetingly repulsive star turn without entirely surrendering to it: As Kroc’s future partner, Joan Smith, the wonderful Linda Cardellini gets a terrific scene in which a personal and professional eye-contact contract is signed between them in the time it takes for her to

stir one synthetic vanilla shake. “I drink your milkshake … I drink it up,” the characters seem on the verge of saying at any point. While inducing comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” likely wouldn’t have flattered Hancock’s smaller, slighter, less gourmet study of the unsavory benefits of all-American corruption, its dubious hero would have been characteristically proud of the steal.