Feedlot Philosophy

FAST FOOD NATION (2006)

FEEDLOT PHILOSOPHY

By golly, there is something going on in the wilds of Texas. Director Richard Linklater, often dubbed St. Richard of Austin, is very good friends with several other Southwestern Indie film mavericks, like Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith. They have forged a kind of “Hollywood-on-the-Brazos”, a place where chances can be taken, where directors can thumb their noses at stolid groups like the Director’s Guild of America and the Writer’s Guild of America. They make their own rules out there on the vastness of the country’s ersatz “largest” state. These filmmakers all assist each other, crewing on each other’s pictures, and helping with financing and distribution and the festival circuit.

Director Linklater, a very hard working artist, may have shot himself in the foot this year though. He was working on FAST FOOD NATION, and at the same time he was finishing the editing on a film he made last year, A SCANNER DARKLY. Both films became ready to distribute simultaneously, and the film- going public was not prepared for a Linklater sensory overload. He presented both films at Cannes this year, a bit of a “package deal”. Unfortunately the net result of his overwhelming creativity was that his two films seem to dilute the impact each to the other. SCANNER was an animated rotoscoped Sci-Fi Gnostic film with a pungent political message. FAST FOOD is a complicated docudrama with several blatant political messages. The box office results for SCANNER were modest at best, and the distribution was meager. In Tacoma it ran less than two weeks. Critics loved it. The public was mostly indifferent to it. And now we have FAST FOOD NATION, and its initial box office receipts are even more modest than SCANNER was. Linklater makes films like THE NEWTON BOYS (1998), THE SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003), and the remake of THE BAD NEWS BEARS (2005), in order to make the films he “believes” in. More power to you, Richard.

FAST FOOD NATION: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2002) is a non-fiction diatribe written by Eric Schlosser, and it was a heavy-duty expose’ of the Meat Packing Industry. Later he wrote other books, like AMERICANS (2003), and REEFER MADNESS: Cheap Labor on the American Black Market (2004), and then back to his food chain roots with CHEW ON THIS (2006). His books dealt with not only the willful callous way the Food Industries reap their enormous profits, but with the hordes of immigrant workers, most of them Hispanic, that they use to facilitate this fraud, rape, and injustice. Schlosser collaborated on the script for FAST FOOD NATION with Richard Linklater, peopling the tale with sympathetic characters and several plot threads, incorporating all the incriminating data that Schlosser had packed into at least three of his books, including the immigrant workers, border coyotes, corporate sharks, cattlemen, fast food managers, teen-agers, and bullying factory foremen—weaving them all into the fabric of the blood-soaked facts. There is a tip of the keyboard to the precursor of such research and story-telling –Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE (1906). Perhaps we have not progressed much from the blatant meat processing crimes of 100 years ago; maybe we have just learned how to mask it, to mantle the frightening reality in chrome, stainless steel, white coats, white hallways, and tricked-up computer graphics.

Linklater gives us three groups of characters –the corporate clones, the cattlemen and the meat packers, with some angst-ridden adolescents thrown into the loosely-linked ensemble piece. But when those end credits roll, one felt as if they had consumed a ton of carbohydrates, and skipped the essential protein. Perhaps it was too ambitious of an endeavor with too much to tell, to expose, to pound home, to illuminate –rapid images racing past us like the subliminal imagery used to train assassins in Alan J. Pakula’s THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), like those fevered images shooting through Rod Steiger’s mind in Sidney Lumet’s THE PAWNBROKER (1964). What Linklater missed out on was the poignant Hispanic drama illustrated in John Sayles’ LONE STAR (1996), or perhaps the acerbic cutting wit found in Jason Reitman’s THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (2005), or even the loopy satire found in Michael Spurlock’s SUPER SIZE ME (2004).

I felt that Linklater and Schlosser’s literate script was not hard-hitting enough. So perhaps Linklater should have stayed with one story line, and fused it with the filmatic left hooks and stomach punches that it sorely lacked –or maybe he could have taken the converse tack and infused it with absurd comedic touches. Either decision might have lodged his important “messages” deeper into our celluloid cortexes. Instead what he delivered was some kind of well intentioned middle ground that never took a stand, and as viewers we are left with a triumvirate of plots that listlessly meander past each other on a Colorado high meadow, but never come together in a marvelous swollen cohesive body of facts and storylines. This feeling of disconnectedness permeated the three plots, as interesting characters in the first half of the film were forsaken, seemingly abandoned and not rejoined until the end credits in a last gasp; more like an after thought.

The laundry list of salient points was lengthy within the film, some free-floating anxiety regarding “big business” ruling entirely too much of our lives, focusing on the meat packing industry force feeding us fecal matter-ridden ground round, steaks, and roasts; some empathy created for those Mexican immigrants who are fleeing the poverty, squalor, and tragedy within their homeland; several thinly-veiled references to right-winged falsely-elected abusers of political power, those pugnacious avarice-driven proliferators of this millennium’s Neo-Fascism; with some light shined on those scantily populated groups of dissident college students who would like to be activists, even though it means a risk of jail time and a complete loss of liberty and citizen’s rights. Case in point, look what a low profile groups like Greenpeace have kept rather than bump helmets with the presently ensconced anti-terrorist secret police holding the Patriot Act over all of our heads like Gestapo-trained John Birch-influenced storm troopers. Yes, all of these facts are touched upon within the heartbeat of this ambitious film, but none of them are truly well taken.

The cinematography was done by Lee Daniels, a long time Linklater collaborator, they have worked together (5) times, in SLACKER (1991), DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993), BEFORE SUNRISE (1995), SUBURBIA (1996), and BEFORE SUNSET (2004). Daniels gave us hot glimpses of the Southwest, full of dusty vast vistas juxtaposed to glaring neon along Cody’s main street, then pointed the lens unflinchingly at the slaughter chutes and the entire bloody goings on in the meat packing and processing plant.

The film’s musical score was created by THE FRIENDS OF DEAN MARTINEZ, a fine band out of Tucson that was reminiscent of Robert Rodriguez’s band, and that particular type of Tex-Mex beat. Their six-string riffs, hot slide chords, and Latino-based percussion added a lot to FAST FOOD’S visuals.

By in large the acting was very good. Greg Kinnear created the corporate brain stormer, Don Anderson, who had the thankless job of traveling to Cody, Colorado to “investigate” the goings on at the primary meat packing plant where his company, MICKEY’S, procured their entire hamburger product; to look into the serious allegations that too much fecal matter was getting into their meat. The problem was no one clued Don into the fact that such forays are supposed to be titular, not actual. He was supposed to take the carefully modulated “tour” of the facility and come home with a clean report exonerating the management, and extolling the virtues of their pristine plant. Instead he actually started talking to folks, and the “truth” he began to hear, and the reality of the situation weighed heavily on him. But caught in the middle, he soon realized that an accurate report on the situation would cost him his job, and possibly his livelihood. So he backed off, and it was implied he “white-washed” the whole affair. Kinnear was good in the part, but he did not bring more to it than he needed. His minimalist lackluster style worked for the character, but we have seen it from him so often before –with the two exceptions of the gay character he played in GOOD AS IT GETS (1997), and when he played Bob Crane in Paul Schrader’s AUTO FOCUS (2002).

Kinnear shared scenes with Kris Kristofferson, as a straight-talking wealthy cattle rancher, and Bruce Willis as a blue-collared corporate middle man. These big name cameos allowed some of Linklater’s political rhetoric to be espoused. Kristofferson underplayed his plain-folks cattleman wonderfully. Willis sat there munching a burger and swilling a beer, in a quietly menacing fearsome manner. As a 30-year veteran in the “meat business”, Willis gleefully drove the corporate hard-line wooden stake right into the middle of Kinnear’s chest. One immediately felt that Willis was capable of anything, from intrigue to violence, to discourage any further investigation on Kinnear’s part. Kinnear backed off quickly, feeling vulnerable, paranoid, and respectful of his “corporate leash”.

Plot thread II dealt with a group of immigrant Mexicans that had been smuggled over the border, then up through New Mexico to Colorado. Wilmer Valderrama (THAT 70’S SHOW), and the lovely Catalina Sandino Moreno, MARIA: FULL OF GRACE (2004), played the two primary characters in the Hispanic group. How these vulnerable, needy newcomers were manipulated first by the border coyotes, like Luis Guzman, and then the gringo “Bosses”, like the sexist mean-spirited meat packing foreman, Bobby Cannavale (whose performance was so convincing I would have been willing to go to Cody and look for this bastard with a baseball bat), became the primary grist of the second half of the film.

But like a rich meringue topping, a third plot thread was woven into the mosaic –the younger generation. This group was spearheaded by the perky Ashley Johnson as Amber, an intelligent teen who dreamed of escaping the confines of Cody, but in the meantime was stuck behind the counter at Mickey’s. She lived with a single mother, Patricia Arquette, who had settled into the mid-life malaise of that place, who dated lots of men, drank too much, and didn’t give her daughter much to aspire to. Only her wayward uncle, played by Ethan Hawke in another of those several brief cameos, reinforced her resolve, and helped her to see beyond the rut she inhabited; enabling her to shift from servitude to some form of activism. Avrial Lavigne, the singer, was a bit unimpressive as a blond cutie in the activist’s cell. Paul Dano, from LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2006), played the part of an arrogant, obnoxious, and petulant punk very effectively. An eon ago, when I too was on the management team of two separate fast food giants, employees like him were prevalent. I, to some extent, empathized with the Mickey’s manager, Esai Morales.

Linklater strikes me as a creative brave extremely well-intentioned progressive sensitive director who is more than willing to grab a project and jump off a cliff with it; and it can be quite a ride before we hit bottom. This film uses the ensemble motif, and as such, it requires a deft hand to guide the warp and weave of so many characters and multiple story lines. Linklater is not quite there yet, at least not in FAST FOOD NATION. He needs to study more Robert Altman films, especially his final film, PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006). The Master made all that character coordination look effortless. Paul Thomas Anderson studied under Altman, even standing by the director’s wheelchair to insure completion of the last film. Paul Haggis showed us with CRASH (2005) that multiple plot lines can co-exist seamlessly.

The last part of the film was the most graphic, as we were walked behind the facade into the area of the slaughter chutes and the killing rooms, cattle being shot in the heads with stun guns, the steaming gut tables, and the cutting of cattle’s throats to a pounding Southwest beat –with thick bovine blood gushing into ankle-deep rivulets, and with blood gorged rats scurrying out from within and beneath the machines. FAST FOOD NATION was a work of conscience –obviously not a “commercial venture”. It will be seen by the smaller audiences in the art houses. It will probably not be seen much out in the mall mega-theaters. I would rate this film at 4 stars, primarily for its earnest attempt to tackle important issues, and along the way providing us with some above average entertainment.

Glenn Buttkus 2006