This is the story of Ray Kroc, the man who took McDonald’s from the McDonald brothers and turned it into a global corporate chain. He’s ruthless egotistical businessman obsessed with branding builds an empire while ripping off business partners. The fact that the description fits the current United States president is a historical accident—the film was in the works before Donald Trump ran—but it lends weight to a film about the soulless corporate players that shaped America.
The story of The Founder—currently streaming on Netflix—is a simple one. Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton continuing his stellar career resurgence) is a traveling salesman who eats at bad drive-in restaurants all the time. One day he dines at an efficiently-run, clean hamburger stand called McDonald’s and thinks he can make a lot of money franchising them. He struggles for control of the expanding business with the founding McDonald’s brothers, wins at their expense, and ends up filthy rich.
The Founder rides along on Michael Keaton’s charm, and the humorous yet sympathetic McDonald brothers—who have a genuinely touching relationship—as portrayed by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch. But it avoids the traditional Hollywood biopic storyline of films like The Social Network or Jobs that depict difficult geniuses who screw over friends yet ultimately lose their souls. Those films, and the general corporate lore, tell us that, yes, the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are assholes but they are visionaries and that’s what it takes to change the world.
The Founder wants us to root for Ray Kroc, at least in the first half, but it’s hard to view him as a visionary. He has no real talents (he’s a laughing stock around town for his long history of failed businesses) and is a pretty crappy husband. He has no particular business insights. The McDonalds brothers are the geniuses who developed the well-oiled burger assembly line and the iconic golden arches. Even the business maneuver that allows Kroc to screw the brothers over—buying land and leasing it to McDonald’s franchises—is thought up by someone else. The Founder is the story of a soulless capitalist who makes a lot of money, learns nothing, and gets away with it. This makes it one of the most accurate portraits of corporate American culture ever filmed.
Its also a fitting depiction of the subject matter. There’s a plausible case to be made that big technology companies like Facebook or Apple are improving our lives. It’s harder to argue that a guy who decided to sell powdered “milkshakes” that contain no milk to save a buck made the world a better place. Kroc’s real talent is in being a huckster. The film is called The Founder, but Kroc isn’t the founder of McDonald’s. He just simply pretended he was and rode his lies, branding, and wealth to the top. You can't afford to sue me,” Kroc explains to Mac McDonald, “I'd bury you in court costs alone. Mac, I'm the president and C.E.O. of a major corporation with land holdings in 17 states... You run a burger stand in the desert.”
Some reviews have complained that The Founder doesn’t present Ray Kroc as sufficiently complicated or sufficiently compromised: that a proper film should have Kroc suffer for his misdeeds and greed. But why are we supposed to pretend that just because someone has made a lot of money that they have some interesting soul or powerful mind? Sometimes—indeed most of the time—they’re just jerks who make money off of other people’s ideas, suffer no consequences, and, if they are lucky, become president.