Fast Food Nation (***1/4)

? When Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear), a rising star from the corporate headquarters of “Mickey’s” orders his company’s “Big One” signature burger at an outlet in the hinterlands, the cook gives him the old spit-in-the-meat. But it turns out that extra-special sauce may not be the worst thing he’s ingesting. The problem, as his boss puts it, is “there’s shit in the meat,” and Don has been sent to check out the Colorado packing plant that turns cows into frozen patties. The ever-versatile Richard Linklater, whose A Scanner Darkly came out just a few months before this, here collaborated with author Eric Schlosser to turn the latter’s non-fiction best-seller into Dan’s story, as well as those of Amber, a low-paid cashier at the hinterlands Mickey’s, and Sylvia, one of the many undocumented Mexicans who form the plant’s compliant labor force. After all, to get beef to wholesale at 40 cents a pound requires efficiency at every step of the fast food chain.

+  Linklater and Schlosser have generally done a good job in creating a storyline that doesn’t simply feel like a documentary in disguise. It helps that some of the juiciest morsels of information are delivered by the likes of Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Willis, colorful in small parts. Sylvia is played by Maria Full of Grace’s Catalina Sandino Moreno, and TV actress Ashley Johnson seems natural as high-school student Amber. Without seeming too heavy-handed, or using one-dimensional characters, Linklater shows how both people and animals become commodities in the same system.

- Don, the corporate guy, disappears from the movie for about an hour, right when his story gets interesting. You can surmise what happens in the meantime, but probably another few minutes, or different editing, would have balanced things out.

= ***1/4 It didn’t bother me that the characters in the three storylines barely intersect, because that’s part of the point, but it’s something some people probably won’t like. Nor are tidy endings and sunny optimism to be found here. (There is occasional humor.) The characters in Fast Food Nation each have to deal with facts that it would be easier to ignore. A lot of people probably won’t want to watch this movie for the same reason, but anyone who’s ever eaten beef that comes from a commercial meat packing plant should watch at least the last ten minutes, a brief but unpleasant tour of the “killing floor,” filmed in a real meat-packing plant, that shows what it takes to turn massive numbers of cows into pieces of meat. This is the flip side of Super Size Me, which looked at a key element mostly missing from the movie’s recipe, the consumer. But anyone who pays attention will supply that ingredient himself.

IMDb link