madbeast

While the story of The Founder is beautifully executed and uniformly well-acted (especially by Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), I found it to be uniquely dramatically unsatisfying. It tells the Machiavellian story of Ray Kroc, the man who wormed his way into the McDonald brothers' inventive means of improving the way fast food is prepared and served, and gradually forced them out because he grew frustrated at following the terms he agreed to in order to become part of their vision.

It begins as an interesting story to see unfold because of the massive importance to society that McDonalds finally became, but ultimately the interest wears thin because there is no character growth or dramatic themes that are explored through the telling of it. Kroc is simply an ambitious nobody with no real ideas of his own who leeches onto the McDonald brothers and then forces them out because he wants to be the guy in charge (even the scheme that allows him to take over the business comes from someone else). True, McDonalds wouldn't be the massive corporation it is today without Kroc's brutal ambitions behind it, but other than that there is no dramatic payoff to his scheming. He is not a charismatic monster like Shakespeare's Richard III nor is he left emotionally empty at the terrible things he's done like Michael Corleone in The Godather. He's just a jerk who wants to get rich no matter who he has to bulldoze over to do it, and does. The filmmakers might have done better to tell the story from the point of view of the McDonald brothers, who are far more sympathetic and interesting characters. Instead, they chose to make their hero a vile, ruthless man who is thoroughly unlikable.

If you want to check out The Founder because you're interested in the historic rise of an important American corporation, by all means do. But if you're looking for a piece of drama that will make you think about themes that you can take with you through life, I'd say give it a pass.

I am no fan of Ernest Hemingway, finding most of his work to be overwritten macho wish fulfillment, so take this with a grain of salt if you're a Poppa addict. But I found the film to be an overlong bore centering around a leaden Gary Cooper (playing the clichéd embodiment of Hollywood's idea of a romantic soldier of fortune) and a ludicrously miscast blonde Swede Ingrid Bergman as a Spanish freedom fighter. Like most of the movie, Bergman is distractingly gorgeous and the filmmakers' choice to shoot it in opulent Technicolor often undercuts the dramatic weight of the story.

Far more convincing than the two leads are Katina Paxnou (who richly deserved the Oscar she won) and Akim Tamiroff as characters grounded with human flaws and inconsistencies that make them compelling, as opposed to the stupefyingly boring Cooper and Bergman, whose only interest comes from the undeniable sexual chemistry that they project. It might have been a perfectly unobjectionable little 1940s adventure film were it not for a script that takes two hours and forty-five minutes to tell a story that frankly isn't very interesting to begin with.

Things finally do start to rev up in the second half when the handsome and heroic Cooper finally starts to play out the manly mission that threw him in the midst of the freedom fighters to begin with, but up to then I found my patience weighed down by Cooper and Bergman making goo-goo eyes at each other while Paxnou/Tamiroff & Company bicker amongst one another, often using Hemingway's flowery prose for dialogue that is completely out of step with their characters.

If you're an advocate of Hemingway's brand of ultra-masculine romanticism you should probably disregard this review. But if you're a more objective viewer, while the film certainly has its positive aspects (usually when Paxnou or Tamiroff is on the screen), be prepared to mouth the word "overrated" after sitting through its lengthy run-time.