Fast Food Nation
Fast Food Nation
Film review by: Witney Seibold
No one can read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation, and think about their hamburger in the same way. With every bite, you begin to taste the horrors that go into making it. The poor condition of the cows, the exploitation of the immigrant labor, the exploitation of teenagers, the uncaring greed of the higher-ups, the destruction of the American landscape, and its subsequent transformation into a bleak, franchised strip-mall Hell.
The book’s distillation into a fictionalized drama will inevitably weaken its impact, and turn any attempted human drama into a slightly pandering and thuddingly preachy polemic, but director Richard Linklater, working from a script co-written by Schlosser, has managed to make an interesting film despite the inherent setbacks. The film does have some really, really obvious images (when feisty teenagers decide to free a herd of cattle, the cattle stand still, scared, refusing to leave their open pen. Could that possibly be an image for the American people? Hm…), and the final shocking scenes of an actual cow getting pulled apart are raw, but in hindsight feel a little manipulative. Luckily Linklater, a very skilled director, managed to salvage some of the drama from the pulpit. While THE MESSAGE may be what the film is really about, it is still a stirring drama.
The ensemble never cross paths: Story one, an exec from Mickey’s (Greg Kinnear), the nations fastest growing fast food chain, has discovered some people are getting sick from eating beef tainted with, well, cowshit. He investigates in a small town in Colorado where the meat-packing plant is located. He finds that the plant is clean and sanitary, but learns from others in the area that he was not shown everything that goes on. Story two: the meat packing plant is populated by undocumented workers who paid good money and risked a lot of come into the States. Among them are Wilmer Valderrama and his fiancée Catalina Sandino Morena. He gets the worst job possible: janitor in a slaughterhouse, and she hears horror stories about how her peers are forced into sleeping with their pit bosses, and are kept in line with free heroin. Story three: A teenage fast-food employee, a straight arrow, played by Ashley Johnson, begins to see the damage that her employer is doing to the country’s landscape and health and cows, and begins to grow into a young activist in the face of a crushing and inescapable employment loop.
By the end of the film, nothing has changed, and everyone’s lives may be a touch worse than before.
Also appearing are big names like Bruce Willis, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Kris Kristofferson, pop star Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke as Johnson’s city-wise hippie uncle who long since fled the small CO town.
In keeping it an unconnected ensemble piece, the film managed to save itself. I could see someone trying to make a vast, interconnected drama out of all this, and it could only be horrid. Although even more effective than what we ended up with would have been a documentary based on Schlosser’s original interviews. Or just read the book. It’ll make you think twice about what you put in your mouth.
