There is a great American novel almost nobody has read: Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan. It concerns a visionary man of business named Frank Cowperwood, and it’s the story of how he helps turn Chicago into a major city by commandeering and then building its mass-transit system. Cowperwood is a sensualist and a romantic; he is driven not by greed but rather by something more elemental. Dreiser makes it clear that business is an artistic endeavor for Cowperwood, a means of expressing his creativity—only he requires a canvas made up of city streets and materials drawn from banks and investors, and he does great harm even as he does great things.
It is an extraordinary book about both the irrepressible vitality and the break-the-china sloppiness of capitalists, damaged only by Dreiser’s customarily clunky prose and the fact that Ayn Rand vulgarized it beyond belief as she fashioned The Fountainhead and stole its thunder. But it’s become an also-ran in the annals of American literature because it is a book whose subject is the creativity of capitalism.
The Founder, a new movie about how an efficient system devised by two brothers at a California hamburger stand made fast food the daily bread of the world, could have been The Titan of our age. The story of how the middle-aged salesman Ray Kroc came upon the McDonald’s in San Bernardino in 1954 and saw the future in it—and how he came to wrest control of the business from the stiff-necked brothers who did not want to compromise on quality—is a dynamic and fascinating one.
Michael Keaton plays Kroc as a cock-of-the-walk banty rooster whose power-of-positive-thinking patter barely masks an existential desperation to make it big even as time is running out on him. The year is 1954, and Kroc is trying and failing to sell a machine that makes milkshakes five at a time to ill-kempt and badly managed drive-ins and diners. Then an order comes in for eight of the machines—all at once, for one establishment. On a whim, he drives from St. Louis to California and sees the original McDonald’s at work. The place is a well-oiled machine, and Kroc is so impressed he gets the brothers McDonald to share with him the tale of their painstaking development of the kitchen system that allows them to serve up a hamburger to a customer in just 30 seconds.
Kroc asks them to allow him to franchise the McDonald’s model. They resist; they tried doing it themselves, but were embarrassed by the franchises they allowed and how the quality didn’t stack up. Kroc promises he will do it differently, and they make a deal. As the franchising system prospers, however, Kroc himself runs into severe financial problems; he isn’t making enough money from his 1.9 percent of each stand’s proceeds to help the company grow, and the brothers won’t renegotiate the deal.
The Founder centers on a typically galvanizing performance by Keaton, whose eyes alone have more charge to them than the Indian Point nuclear plant. But the movie denies itself Keaton’s electricity in its own storytelling. It’s about a midcentury human dynamo who steamrolls his way to glory, but the film is not dynamic in the least. It’s shockingly dull. Screenwriter Robert Siegel and director John Lee Hancock want us to know that what Ray Kroc did to the McDonald brothers was not nice, and so they do what they can to keep their movie from being complicit with his scheming. In so doing they flatten out the proceedings. The cinematography looks like stale Kodachrome photos fading to black and white. The music on the soundtrack has no vigor. Most of the scenes are shot in shadow. It’s dreary to look at, and that appears to be a deliberate decision.
The movie splits Dreiser’s Cowperwood in two. The McDonald brothers are the creative capitalists who design a new way to serve food in a feat of passion and engineering. Kroc is the crook who makes it all happen. For Siegel and Hancock, the McDonald boys are paragons of virtue while Kroc is a desperate dreamer who turns entirely amoral in pursuit of his aims. He buys them out for $2.7 million—or around $22 million in today’s dollars. The movie portrays this as a monstrous human tragedy. Come on. They got immensely rich off a well-run hamburger stand, and if they had been left to their own devices, nothing would have happened.
Indeed, in his book The Fifties, David Halberstam quotes Richard McDonald saying that if he had ended up the head of the McDonald’s Corporation, “I would have wound up in some skyscraper somewhere with about four ulcers and eight tax attorneys trying to figure out how to pay all my income tax.”
What really irked the McDonalds was Kroc trying to take credit for their inspiration by calling himself “the founder” of McDonald’s. They had a point, and the movie follows the example of the McDonald’s Corporation itself following Kroc’s death in setting the record straight.
That’s not a lot to hang a movie on, and The Founder fails because it doesn’t appreciate the complex accomplishments of the character who occupies nearly every second of its screen time.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
