Fast Food Nation

Based on Eric Schlosser's best-selling critique of the fast food industry, Fast Food Nation presents us with fictional megacorp Mickey's Burgers and asks how a company like this functions at each stage of production. This is done via a series of interconnected stories. Sylvia, Coco and Raul are desperately poor illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico looking for work. Amber is a schoolgirl working behind the counter at Mickey's to save up money for college. And Don is an executive sent to investigate how so much fecal matter is ending up in the burgers served up every day to millions of Americans. Essentially a nice guy, he is unprepared for what he discovers, badly shaken by the extent to which he has been misled. Amber is concerned with supporting her friends, helping out her single mother and planning for the future, but gradually finds herself drawn toward activism. The immigrants, meanwhile, face sexual exploitation, drug dependency and working conditions which could literally cost them an arm and a leg. And it's not until the very end of the movie that we get to see how bad things are for the cows.

Fast Food Nation is not a pretty movie; there are grotesque scenes throughout, amid depictions of carelessness which many viewers will find hard to take seriously, though there's plenty of information available elsewhere to back the movie's claims. By presenting the tale as fiction, director Linklater has taken a bit of the sting out of it and, conveniently, helped it to go down more easily.

It's not an aggressive propaganda piece but rather a story about human experiences. Its political naivete is deliberate and enables it to address questions which viewers might not find answered by a more sophisticated work. Most of these begin with "Why don't people do something about...", and are answered by a scene in which the fence encircling a feed lot full of cows is broken. Given the option of escaping onto the prairie, the cows prefer to remain standing lazily in their own excrement, looking forward to another tasty, easy meal.

There are a lot of problems with Fast Food Nation as a piece of cinema. Intercutting between stories like this only really works if characters are strong enough for the audience to keep caring about their fate, which is rarely the case here. Often scenes drag on too long or don't really seem to have anything to say. Deliberately stagey acting underscores events with a certain humour but sometimes becomes irritating. Altogether there is a sense of being too distant from events, so that the horrors with which we are bombarded don't have the impact they should. Nevertheless, you're unlikely to leave this film unaffected. Don't make any plans to go for a burger afterwards.