Gary
Dretzka
Leonard
Klady
David
Poland
Doug
Pratt
Ray Pride
Patricia Vidal
Fast
Food Nation
Directed by Richard
Linklater
Release Date: November 10, 2005
Richard Linklater’s heartening, lucid polemic, Fast Food Nation, is so much better than the reception it got at Cannes when it debuted earlier this year. Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book, "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," with over 1.4 million copies in print, is nonfiction. Schlosser is also a produced playwright, and that profession shows in his collaboration with Linklater, with its sense of focused outrage, which is always dramatically parsed without the extended, overly pointed monologues of, say, John Sayles’ work, and with succinct wit, such as describing the central problem this way—"I’m saying there’s shit in the meat.” (See also: "Marketing 101: don’t kill the customer" and "There’s a reason it only costs 99 cents.") The e. coli-infested meat leads its Slacker-style vignettes from the boardroom of the fictional but too-easy-to-imagine "Mickey’s" hamburger chain, to Colorado ranches and slaughterhouses, to keystroke-surveilled Mickey’s chain stores, to clutches of student activists who think they can free the cattle, but don’t realize the cattle have customs of their own. Fast Food Nation parses an elemental dilemma of the American working class today: everyone wants some sort of change, but each character, from whatever profession or life experience, falls short in one way or the other. Linklater is an admirer of the great French director Robert Bresson, and Fast Food’s characters are just as naïve as the titular donkey in Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar: it’s Bresson with a side of fries. There is attention to sound and image here that produces some of the most quietly sophisticated work that Linklater has done yet, and in some ways, it is a dour masterpiece, examining the terrorism, the emotional and moral mastication of a food chain gone very, very wrong. The film’s not at all depressing: it’s just very, very serious and gratifyingly thoughtful. (Hawke’s character is a complex wonder.) The ending recalls a particular documentary by another French filmmaker named Georges Franju; if the next-to-the-last scene strikes you, search for his name along with the subject matter. The final shot is a brilliant punch in the face.
