Fast Food Nation

Richard Linklater’s new movie Fast Food Nation is about fast food production rather than consumption. It can’t be easy to adapt a non-fiction book full of statistical data (I only read the review of the book and heard author Eric Schlosser’s interview on the radio). A natural choice would have been to make a documentary out of Schlosser’s best-selling book of the same title, but Linklater is never one to do things easily. Together he and Schlosser paint on a large canvas to illustrate how America produces large quantities of fast food at such cheap rates. The answer is not pretty. It lies in third world poverty and corporate exploitation of the situation. Inevitably one major issue in the movie is illegal immigration from Mexico to America.

Linklater and Schlosser’s story revolves around three sets of characters: Don (played by Greg Kinnear), an executive of fictional fast food chain Mickey’s; Amber (played by Ashley Johnson), a high school student and part time counter worker at Mickey’s in Cody, Colorado; Raul (played by Wilmer Valderrama), Sylvia (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Coco, three illegal Mexican immigrant who work at a meat processing plant in Cody that makes all the burger patties for Mickey’s. Most of the non-Mexican characters in the movie are created as mouthpieces to pass out some of the information from the book to the audience. They feel staged and cliché. One can sense from miles away how their plot lines are going to turn out. However, they do also serve as a contrast to the hard immigrants’ lives in America. The scenes keep juxtaposing our daily lives in the States and the hard journey made by the Mexicans. The scene in which Amber and some other young idealist try to free the cattle is also quite telling about effective activism. The movie is at its best when it tells the story of those three immigrant workers. Linklater and Schlosser succeed in questioning the social consequences of globalization and awakening our moral consciences.

To me, Linklater is always a crafty director. Even in a movie that is uneven from time to time, his brilliance still shines through. One little detail particularly stands out for me. When Don is hesitant about whether he should do the right thing to disclose the truth about the meat plant, he stands in his room with half his face in the dark and half in the moonlight. Then he gradually completely retreats into the dark. At that point, we know what he has decided to do before we hear him on the phone to the company’s CEO.

The cast of the movie includes many familiar faces, but unfortunately most of them basically repeat their familiar roles here. Kinnear plays another family man struggling with what is morally right and what is best for his family; Ethan Hawke’s role is simply his character in Reality Bites 10 years down the line; Moreno is good as Sylvia, but Sylvia is really not much different from Maria she played in Maria Full of Grace. Valderrama actually turns in a strong performance here, but with all the tabloid stories about him, it is just hard to take him seriously in any movie. One actor that does leave a strong impression for me, even after the movie, is Esai Morales. He has only a few minutes’ screen time, but during that time period, he got my full attention. When he talks with Don and Amber, he makes such smooth transition in his tone and attitudes that he is absolutely convincing as a shrewd small business (in this case, one Mickey’s restaurant) owner.

Fast Food Nation has the saddest and most heart wrenching scene of all the movies this year. When Linklater shows the slaughter of the cattle, I cried, not just for the inhumane treatment of the animals, but also for the indifference people have exhibited on the spot in the slaughterhouse. I was saddened and scared to see that people could learn to adjust to this kind of cruelty every day and become immune to this kind of violence. That whole sequence of cattle killing is soul-shockingly powerful and it may haunt you for a long time.

Along with Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation will make people think twice before stepping into any fast food restaurant. Unfortunately, not too many people have seen both films.