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Trailer for "Fast Food Nation"

Although he has solid credentials in Hollywood as the director of movies like The School of Rock and The Bad News Bears, Richard Linklater at heart remains an independent filmmaker. He set a template for his career with his first feature, Slacker, a free-form quasi-documentary which spends a day floating around the denizens of his home town of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on conversations rich in ideas, questions and occasional lunacies. That none of these are fully developed, let alone resolved, only added to the charm of the piece.

Linklater employed the same tactic to varying degrees on Waking Life and the recent A Scanner Darkly. And he uses it again on what might seem unlikely source material, an adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s best-seller Fast Food Nation.

Even if you haven’t read Schlosser’s book, you’ve probably heard about it. It got a lot of media attention when it was published in 2002 for its well-researched probe of the American fast food industry and the social ramifications of our growing dependence on it in our daily lives. Of course we all know that fast food isn’t good for us, but Schlosser had a way of reinforcing the point that was hard to ignore. I haven’t eaten a burger since hearing him point out that a typical fast food hamburger patty can contain pieces of hundreds, if not thousands of cattle.

On hearing that Schlosser and Linklater (who co-wrote the film) decided to do it as a fictional story rather than a documentary, you might well expect a scare film, like a modern adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (probably the best-selling novel never to have been adapted into a movie). But while the film of Fast Food Nation has its cautionary qualities, and a few moments in a slaughterhouse that may shock some, it isn’t really out to frighten us. Rather, it wants to follow as many as possible of the threads spun out from what some would call the “scientific” practice of bringing a consistent food product to an increasing population.

The first half of the film most resembles a conventional storyline, focusing largely on Greg Kinnear as a marketing executive with Mickeys, a fast food chain whose resemblance to any real operation is surely a mere coincidence. (Or not.) His career is on the rise ever since he introduced an oversized burger sold as “The Big One.” But when outside tests indicates that the product contains more than acceptable levels of cow feces, he is sent to investigate the Colorado meat-packing operation that supplies Mickeys.

As a character he’s impossibly naïve, but he functions as a vehicle for the script to bring in a number of perspectives on the industry, including Kris Kristofferson as a veteran rancher and Bruce Willis as a restaurant owner who has some insights into the real factors that make the food business run.

At the same time, the film also tracks the experiences of a group of illegal Mexican immigrants as they are brought over the border and up into Colorado to work for the meat packer.

By the middle of the film, Fast Food Nation more or less loses the Kinnear character to follow others. It’s at this point that viewers expecting a linear narrative may start to lose patience, especially during a long, didactic scene with Ethan Hawke as a free spirit who tries to show his high-school-age niece that she has more options in life other than working at Mickeys.

Linklater seems genuinely interested in everyone’s perspective and experiences, from the plant manager who uses his position to sexually exploit his female workers, to the local college students frustrated by their inability to find an effective way to protest the plant’s sins, to lesser characters whose unfocused lives are the result of the metaphorical implications of the film’s title.

Some viewers may find Linklater’s method to be haphazard and vague; there certainly are points where the film could have been tightened a bit. And those looking to be scared into eating better probably won’t get much help here. I think that Linklater and Schlosser work on the assumption that the audience for this movie already knows that a diet of burgers and fries is bad for them, even though they may eat them on a regular basis. What they succeed in doing is showing that there are a lot of issues revolving around the food choices we make other than the amounts of trans fat and calories we ingest. Instead of scaring you, they want to give you something to think about, and at that they have certainly succeeded.