Review: Mockumentary shows unsettling effects of fast food

Directed By: Richard Linklater

Starring: Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama, Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis

Rated: R

Someday – maybe not soon, but someday – film critics, scholars and fans are going to give Richard Linklater and Eric Schlosser the credit they deserve for the utter originality and deft execution of the vision they shared in the making of “Fast Food Nation.” In the meantime, the film will have to suffer with clever one-phrase reviews like, “No meat, all filler” and “A less than satisfying meal.”

So be it. The film is not above criticism. But it is surely going to be the signpost for a new breed of movie.

Linklater directed and the pair co-wrote the screenplay based on Schlosser’s nonfiction best seller, “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.”

“Mockumentaries” have become a widely exploited (usually with hilarious results) genre of film, but while “This is Spinal Tap” and “A Mighty Wind” are fiction pieces posing as fact, “Fast Food Nation” turns the style on its ear and is a documentary posing as a drama.

Schlosser’s 2001 book was a new century take-off on Upton Sinclair’s novel, “The Jungle.” Sinclair was an admitted socialist but his unnerving depiction of the Chicago meat-packing industry – and the effect that industry had on myriad aspects of daily life worldwide – led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. The book explored the near slavery-like conditions that were the day-to-day realities of the poorest (and most poorly treated) of the American working class and shattered idealism that was the result.

Schlosser’s book is somewhat lighter at times, but is nonetheless a powerful work. He shows the impact that the fast food industry has on the health, social, economic and political aspects of life in the 21st century. Obesity, monopolization of business, the destruction of the “family farm” and even the spread of illegal drugs, are subjects that the book and the film point out as logical conclusions to the wheels that have been set in motion.

The book is unsettling and would have made for a great straight-up documentary. Someone else may do that yet.

But Linklater sets up his film as a morality play and takes a cue from Robert Altman in his use of a large ensemble cast and intersecting stories.

The story is impelled at first when marketing director Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear) – the man who developed “The Big One” burger for a chain called Mickey’s – is sent to Cody, Colo., to find out why fecal matter has been showing up in some of the meat supplied by local packing houses.

The tour of seeing how a “Big One” is manufactured is interesting while containing unsettling underpinnings.

Anderson meets the owner of a large ranch (Kris Kristofferson) who decries the urban sprawl and corporate farming that is driving people like himself out of their way of life.

Anderson is conflicted by his job, as are many of the Mickey’s front-line employees. Amber, played touchingly by young Ashley Johnson, is struggling to get through college and pushed along in her altruistic beliefs by her socially active uncle (Ethan Hawke). She decides she simply can’t work at Mickey’s any longer. She and a group of her radical wannabe friends try an act of sabotage that backfires when they overestimate the will and intelligence of the ranch-raised bovines they are trying to save. A few parallels might be drawn.

Another of the major plots, with its own intertwining tales, focuses on the flood of illegal immigrants who come across the border to find their version of the American dream by working at the slaughterhouses and packing plants. Fear of deportation looms over their heads and tends to help management keep the employees toeing the line. Some use methamphetamine to help them stay awake for their labor-intensive work shifts. Some are injured on the job but find they take the blame for the accidents. Others are sexually harassed and have to accept the treatment or lose their jobs. The next worst thing to losing one’s job is to be transferred to “the killing floor.” The film’s final ten minutes take place there and it is shown in all its gut-churning, vivid gore.

Linklater sprinkles a number of subtleties in the action. We see corporate-trained workers (“associates,” rather) mouth their by-the-book dictated patter but seldom bother to listen to the responses. Diners are shown happily salting food that one knows already contains enough sodium to meet a few days’ worth of FDA recommended daily allowances.

Critics may be right in saying that many of the plots seem to go nowhere, but if one is familiar with the source material, everything Linklater does makes sense – sometimes in a decidedly underplayed manner.

“Fast Food Nation” will surely be food for thought for many, in the manner of recent films like “The Insider” and “Thank You for Smoking.”

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician. He can be reached at info@wunderlesound.com.