Language: English
Directed : Richard Linklater
Writing credits (WGA) : Eric Schlosser(written by)
Cast: Greg Kinnear , Bruce Willis , Catalina Sandino Moreno

"Fast Food Nation" is a dramatization of author Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction bestseller, and Schlosser has collaborated with filmmaker Richard Linklater with the screenplay of this adaptation. What we get is two parallel stories. One involving a marketing executive (Greg Kinnear) of a fast food chain called Mickey’s. The second story involves a group of Mexican immigrants that arrive at our country to work at meat-processing plants because it’s cheap labor for an undesirable job.

Vividly, we see everything at some point involving the evisceration and disembowelment of a cow to its destination at the assembly line where the meat is finally cut up. There are viewers that will want to see this kind of stuff, to look at the truth of how our meat is processed, and then there are people that will never want to see any of this because the truth is so ugly.

Yet if you have the stomach to see this film, then you will see that Linklater has made one of his best films – it’s a masterpiece. And it’s a masterpiece because I can’t imagine a better film being made about this subject. There couldn’t possibly be another film that threads together so many compelling small stories into a big picture that ultimately serves to criticize the fast food industry. There are parts for Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Esai Morales, Avril Lavigne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama, Bobby Cannavale, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman and most notably Bruce Willis.

We do get some shapeless scenes near the beginning involving Mexicans illegally crossing the border – a couple of minutes could have been excised in the editing room, but it hardly damages the overall integrity of the movie. We are drawn immediately into the developing story of Don Henderson (Kinnear) who has been asked by his boss at corporate to do some fact-finding investigation at a meat-plant in Cody, Colorado. His boss informs him that there are reports that fecal matter is finding its way into the meat. It is dryly observed that this could be bad for business.

Henderson packs his bags and leaves his bourgeoisie wife and kids at home to visit Colorado. He gets a tour of the meat-processing plant, and to his befuddled amazement, it looks clean and sterile. He wonders if he has received any misinformation on this assignment. Linklater then stages two dialogue exchanges, back-to-back, first between Kinnear and Kristofferson (a cow herder), and Kinnear and Willis (a meat supplier), which are among the best dialogue exchanges in the movies of recent years.

Particularly in the scene between Kinnear and Willis, a matter of conversational skills are put to the test. Willis is this bullish and philandering type that we gather within a build-up of one scene, and we sense that he has a way of controlling the direction of conversations with all people. Nobody could have been better cast than Willis. In the scene, Willis admits that he knows that the mean used at Mickey’s fast food chains are contaminated. Willis informs Kinnear that he is saving the Mickey’s corporation lots of money by buying cheap meat. Such a problem with fecal contamination on the food product is eradicated if it’s grilled on high temperatures, and thus, there shouldn’t be any problem at all with eating it, according to Willis.

There’s a running story about young kids working at fast food joints that finally get sick of working there. Ashley Johnson plays one of these bright kids named Amber who is stuck in a low-wage job to help support her mother (Arquette). She starts to learn the truth about the meat plant: Local cattle produces more urine and feces than all of the people in Denver, none of which is treated, and all of it is seeping into groundwater. Local college kids band together to protest, but in a funny yet pathetically disappointed way are unequipped to splash any waves that would get the attention of corporate interest.

"Fast Food Nation" is sick, darkly humorous, infuriating, outrageous and incendiary, but one of the treats of any Linklater film is his trademark conversational dialogues that have more or less to do than the actually story or plot. Hawke, in a way reprising his role in Linklater’s earlier film Waking Life, comes to visit his niece Amber and philosophizes with her over a game of chess, and what’s on his mind is this dissertation on global dynamics and the corporate economy, and in a way, this detour enriches the themes and motifs of the film. It’s another one of those brilliant dialogues that you expect to get from a Linklater film, whose films always add layers of smart discussions and polemics on top of the underlying material.

What’s left is a story of the Mexican immigrants, played by the likes of Valderrama ("That 70’s Show") and Moreno ("Maria Full of Grace") whom must suffer the indignities of working the meat-processing plant. Adding troubles and dramatic complexities, there are sex triangles amongst workers, chronic drug usage, injuries and disfigurement that is to occur, and of course, the instructional teaching between a floor manager and an employee on how to remove the kidneys from a cow. You walk away from the movie stunned but also a little more self-aware – you might find yourself checking for FDA-approved Grade-A stamp of approval for now on when you are shopping for meat at the supermarket. Perhaps the Grade-A stamp might now matter anyways, but we’ll do it for comfort’s sake. The basic problem: There are too many of the world’s people to feed, too fast an assembly line, and too many mistakes that can be made in cutting up the meat.
 

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