Fast Food Nation

Fox Searchlight

Directed by Richard Linklater

1 Star



If “Super-Size Me” is the documentary version of street-corner proselytizing against evil corporate junk food, “Fast Food Nation” is its object-lesson counterpart, tediously preaching to the proverbial choir.

Director Richard Linklater’s much-anticipated feature film “Fast Food Nation” is not a documentary. Rather, it is a fictional account that dramatizes the nonfiction book by the same name, written by Eric Schlosser, the film’s co-author. “Fast Food Nation” imbeds facts about the American fast food industry in specious “real people” vignettes, hoping to make the statistics come alive with a Hollywood budget and a star-studded cast and crew.

Cinematographer Lee Daniel has worked extensively with Linklater on past projects like “Before Sunset” and “Dazed and Confused.” The visual aspects of the film maintain finesse while capturing the script-dictated images of commercialization, mass consumerism, and varying amounts of dead cows.

However, the incessant, heavy-handed dialogue and the poor character development doom this film to be a disgraceful feature rather than a respectable documentary. The attempt at a creative and educational film that would compel America to change its ways results in a badly written guilt trip that lasts just under two hours.

On the whole, each actor in the ensemble cast does his best with the role he is given, however unnatural his lines or his character. Greg Kinnear (“Little Miss Sunshine”) portrays the head of marketing of Mickey’s, an imaginary fast food chain. He is onscreen for the majority of the movie and might have become a character to whom the audience could relate; instead, his character serves only to initiate the fusion of the corporate and industrial worlds.

Wilmer Valderrama (“That 70’s Show”), Catalina Sandino Moreno (“Maria Full of Grace”), and Ana Claudia Talancon (“Alone With Her”) successfully play out the drama of illegal immigrant workers at the meatpacking plant. Their acting can be deemed “successful” probably because they spoke in Spanish with English subtitles; their speeches about drug use and American materialism felt less forced than correlating political rants by their English-speaking cast mates.

Ashley Johnson (“Nearing Grace”) and Paul Dano (“Little Miss Sunshine”) complete the fast food trinity as employees at the local branch of Mickey’s, infusing teen angst with lofty activist undertones or unchecked crudeness, respectively.

While most roles have at least a hollow function in the film, the most over-hyped actors play characters with no redeeming value whatsoever. Ethan Hawke’s (“Before Sunrise”) pithy role lets him communicate several assertions of idealism before peacing out of the film entirely. Avril Lavigne plays a character whose defining moment is her utterance of the line—“How come in real life the bad guys always win?”—after an unsuccessful liberation of cows from the meatpacking plant.

The only time when the movie is enjoyable is when the filmmakers forget about trying to shove their party line down the audiences’ throats and have some fun with their characters. The best moments occur when the action works against the overarching, suffocating message of the film: when the stupid activist kids aren’t powerful enough to convince the cows to leave the system, the audience is reminded that, well, the filmmakers aren’t going to have much success liberating the viewer either.

Bottom Line: Clumsy fusion of fact and fiction in “Fast Food Nation” is far worse for digestion than any over processed hamburger. If you want to be educated, read the book. If you want to be entertained, pick a different movie.

—Reviewer Mollie K. Wright can be reached at mkwright@fas.harvard.edu.