FIRST LOOK: Fast Food Nation

Food for Thought

by Kent Jones

Don’s a company man, formerly of ESPN and now of Mickey’s, the burger chain. He’s the guy who thought up the hot new product The Big One (along with his “team”), and he’s headed up to Cody, Colorado at the urging of his boss, to confidentially check out the situation with the meat in the burgers coming out of the local processing and packing plant. They’ve tested positive for “fecal matter,” a polite way of saying that they’re full of shit.

If Fast Food Nation were another movie—Traffic, let’s say, or something by John Sayles—Greg Kinnear’s Don would be the disillusioned white-collar avenger, the man weakened by his own success who stumbles into untapped deposits of moral courage as scandalous corporate revelations loom on the horizon. In fact, that’s pretty much what starts to happen here. He is directed to a wise old independent rancher (Kris Kristofferson) for counsel, and he gets the lowdown on exactly how much shit there is in the meat and exactly how it gets there. And he even musters the courage for a confrontation with a different kind of company man, a wall of blustering, experience-wizened, sun-baked skin and muscle played by Bruce Willis, who’s negotiated a great price with the plant for Mickey’s, and who promptly lobs a few morsels of pragmatic advice over the lunch table (they’re having... what else? Burgers). Moral crusades are all well and good, but it’s Don’s ass that will ultimately be on the line. So if there’s shit in the meat, just cook it.

At which point, Don takes neither the high nor the low road, but heads right down the middle. Kinnear has excelled at playing mild-mannered suburban types, and given form and _expression to the itchy discomforts of the easy life, modern American style, the dark pockets of pensive doubt behind so much confident smiling. I’m not sure if he’s ever been as touching or as believably human as he is here, in Richard Linklater’s casually insightful and terribly, terribly sad fictional version of Eric Schlosser’s best-selling book.

When Fast Food Nation is released this autumn, it’s certain we will be treated to plenty of critical comparisons with the aforementioned Traffic and such Sayles mini-epics as City of Hope, Lone Star, and Sunshine State. Which is, on the face of it, perfectly reasonable. Like those earlier films, Nation tracks multiple storylines, each one featuring a different sociological type: Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno, from Maria Full of Grace), who crosses the border illegally with her husband and sister and several countrymen, who are delivered to work the worst jobs in the meat-packing plant; Kinnear’s wary junior exec; Amber, a bright teenage girl (Ashley Johnson) who works behind the counter of the local Mickey’s, and who listens attentively to all the voices around her as she prepares for adulthood. And as in the Soderbergh and Sayles films, the storylines dovetail, teasingly converge and then separate—Don’s car goes straight at the light and the van packed with Mexicans turns left; he meets Amber when he stops for dinner at Mickey’s; Amber hooks up with a group of activists at the local university, and they decide to protest the conditions at the plant by cutting the fence and setting the cows free.

But this is a Linklater film, which means that motives are easily displaced or dissolved, character trajectories casually re-aligned by a stray suggestion here, a hint there. Terrible things will happen—the abominable foreman (Bobby Cannavale) will get Sylvia’s sister hooked on crank and add her to his lengthy list of sexual conquests, and Sylvia’s husband will have an industrial accident. Some funny stuff will happen too: Sylvia’s husband and his friend will be accosted by a colony of rats scurrying out of the air shaft on the roof, and the friend will let out a girlish scream; the pimply kid working the grill will pull the classic move and hock up a little extra flavor for Kinnear’s burger when he sees him flirting with Amber; and, in the film’s most humorously poignant moment, the cows will stay put, unaware of their status as political prisoners.

Most tellingly, though, the time that Sayles fills with backstory and declamatory speeches, or that Soderbergh would give over to artfully rendered tabloid drama, is devoted here to what was once known as dead time: walking, looking around at Cody’s “paradise” of neon and chain stores, listening to adults bantering about alternate scenarios for getting out of town, and, most of all, just thinking... or wondering. The keynote moment of this unassuming film, one of the most politically astute to come out of this country in quite some time, might be Kinnear stopping by the side of a road and gazing off into the vast western expanses. “Why do the bad guys always win?” wonders Amber a little later in the movie. As Kinnear looks off at the Rockies, he might be pondering the same question, and realizing that it’s not a person, but the spaces we keep between us.