1 9 5 4. Ray Kroc is a petty traveling salesman trying to sell milkshake mixers, while his wife Ethel is quietly underwhelmed by him. One day, while in San Bernardino, Ray stumbles upon a small, but effective fast food restaurant McDonalds and offers the two brothers running it, Dick and Mac McDonald, a business partnership, aiming to expand their restaurant into a franchize. The McDonalds brothers are reluctant, worrying about quality control of far away restaurants, but agree upon a contract. Ray opens several McDonalds restaurants in various cities, but his share of the profit is only 1.4%, not enough for a major expansion. Upon an advice by financial advisor Sonnebron, Ray buys off the land upon which the McDonalds restaurants are built on, and slowly takes charge of the business. In the end, he buys the McDonalds brand from the McDonalds brothers, becomes a millionaire, divorces Ethel and marries Joan Smith.
Even though it is very direct and straight-forward, "The Founder" is an excellent biopic that reminds of the era of "classic Hollywood" movies where the fascinating story and characters alone are enough to sustain the viewers attention until the end. The director John Lee Hancock and screenwriter Robert Siegel give enough room to elevate the true story about the creation of the McDonalds fast-food chain a dimension above the average documentary flicks, kudos also to the great ensemble cast led by Michael Keaton as the sleazy traveling salesman Ray Kroc, who undergoes a bizarre character arc from a modest, fragile traveling salesman to a selfish, manipulative business shark. It also gives a sly commentary on the nature of capitalism: what matters is not who is the best, but who is the most appealing and the most marketable. In the end, the movie is a tale of two establishments: the McDonalds brothers founded the McDonalds restaurant, but Ray founded the McDonalds franchize. The irony that the two McDonald brothers are in the end not even able to open a restaurant under their own name is not lost on the story. The sequence alone where the two brothers are telling Ray how they came up with their fast-food restaurant is engaging already in itself: they realized that the three most sold items are burgers, fries and drinks, and thus focused only on that; in order to cut costs to the maximum, they got rid of the waitresses, persuading the customers to get their own orders, and switched to fully disposable dishware which can be simply thrown into trash; finally, they drew an outline of their restaurant on the ground and used dozens of employees to figure out which of the room compositions would be the most efficient, until they chose the one where the kitchen is in the centre of the location. Some of the changes are not quite well explained (for instance, how Ray was able to circumvent the contract in spite of McDonalds' objections), but the story is full of juicy details and analytics of how this system was established.
Grade:+++
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