Reviews

I'm not gonna write a synopsis of this film; others have done that already. Small town salesman stumbles on the chance of a lifetime, and from it creates a food empire. Along the way, things start to change. Against the noble-minded but provincial McDonald brothers, Ray Kroc struggles upstream, good-hearted American dream seeker at first, then insidiously segueing into the vicious, cannibalistic uber-capitalist that he insists is absolutely necessary to establish great marches for himself.

Well acted, well done, this movie tells the story chillingly well. Keaton, with his indomitable go-forward-and-blitz-the-opposition really knocked my socks off. To no small manner was his dry, monotonic, gravelly voice expressing his quick, no-nonsense, no-further-argument directives in a manner like orders from a colonel: end-of-story, no questions accepted.

OK, the movie. But why did I call it ironic in my summary? Now, the product. A few years back I showed the movie "Supersize me" to a class of high school students. For those of you who don't know, it's a doc of a healthy young man who eats nothing but super-sized McDonald's burgers, fries and cokes (not diet cokes either) for a month. Afterward, he was obese and diagnosed with a variety of ailments that took a lot longer than the month he OD'ed on his McGorgings. So, putting these two films side by side is the iron: A man with very questionable ethics creates a gonzo empire that sells a product with questionable health value. What would the original McDonald brothers think about those burgers now? I wonder what goes into them? Oh, yes, I've eaten plenty of them, in a few places here and abroad. I'll give the movie a solid B+.

This is only the third time I've seen this film (2006), having first seen it when it came out in 1968 and again in 1975. At each of those times the movie reflected stages of transition in my own life, and that is what makes it so riveting, scarily so, even today almost 40 years after I first saw it.

This movie, like Midnight Cowboy and others, effectively demonstrates how small-town repression and childhood experiences invariably seep into our adult lives and influence them in ways not always recognizable or to our benefit. Here is a repressed girl in a repressive small town (often New England is a symbol of suffocating, inbred, isolated, deep-level collective cultural phantoms.) doing her best to essentially stay that way, despite the well-intentioned but misdirected efforts of Calla (did Estelle Parsons play the cantankerous sister in "I Never Sang for my Father"?). That church scene would make me feel downright creepy in I were conned into attending it. The flashbacks to childhood, especially the dying boy and her own experience in the basket in the mortuary prep room, are chillingly effective in conveying the grip her youth's experiences still have on her.

As for the picture the man shows Woodward, I thought it was his dead twin brother, or it could have been his son. But the phone call she later made indicated he had no family, so it's anyone's guess as who's picture it is. I still think it's the brother. And that may bring Rachel dangerously close to the hold that her childhood could still have on her.

Finally, Rachel's decision to go to Oregon (a symbol of liberation from past miasmas, a "coming into one's own light a la the free-standing Kouros, a Jungian "individuation") makes this film very satisfying to watch. We're still left wondering--how much of her baggage does she take with her? But I left thinking that she was free enough to decide that consciously and independently.