“Fast Food Nation” puts a narrative spin on Eric Schlosser’s best-selling non-fiction book, a cruise through the harmful effects of the fast-food industry in super-size America.
Making a fictionalized film out of a muckraking piece of journalism is unusual, but here, it works: Much of “Fast Food Nation” has an odd, fresh, experimental quality.
Schlosser and director Richard Linklater (“Slacker”) have invented a cross-section of characters to illustrate the fast-food universe. We begin in the corporate headquarters at Mickey’s, a chain that invented “The Big One,” a successful burger.
Only problem is, “The Big One” contains ingredients that nobody would want to include with their lettuce, pickle and sesame-seed bun. “Cow waste” would be the polite way to describe it. So Mickey’s sends marketing manager Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear) out to a giant Colorado meatpacking plant to investigate.
Meanwhile, we follow a group of illegal immigrants, who are also arriving at the Colorado plant. They’ll take the more unpleasant and dangerous jobs. Notable among them are a skeptical young woman (Catalino Sandino Moreno, from “Maria Full of Grace”) and her pragmatic boyfriend (Wilmer Valderrama).
There’s also a teenage cashier (Ashley Johnson) at the local Mickey’s, who begins to suspect that the cows at the nearby feedlot are not contented. She and her classmates (among them singer Avril Lavigne), a typical Linklater band of outsiders, get a vague idea of maybe doing something about it.
The actors are decent, although you miss Kinnear when he disappears from the movie halfway through. Kris Kristofferson pops up as a rancher tracking the vanishing of the untamed landscape, and Bruce Willis has a single sinister monologue about corporate complacency.
The problem with issue movies is that they can put information ahead of drama. This film doesn’t avoid that pitfall, and some scenes make their point so broadly that they cross over into the zone of lecture. Especially blatant is the appearance of Johnson’s uncle, played by Ethan Hawke, who summarizes the dangers of fast-food culture, as though we’d missed the previous hour’s worth of movie.
Yet the movie’s tone is rarely that hectoring. If anything, it has a laid-back, hushed approach – the stillness of horror. Linklater doesn’t want to grab you by the shoulders, he wants to sneak up on you. That approach works, and it gives the climax, a visit to the meatpacking plant’s kill floor, a special (if nauseating) punch. It’s an uneven film in the end, but it might inspire some people to occasionally fix their own lunch.
Paul Dano appears in “Fast Food Nation,” a fictionalized thriller inspired by Eric Schlosser’s expose of junk food companies.
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