Sex, fries and videotape
March 11, 2007 | 12:00am
There’s a recurring phrase in Richard Linklater’s movie Fast Food Nation that’s supposed to make us all wake up and get angry: "There’s shit in the meat." Variations on this phrase are uttered by several characters, including Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), a PR guy for the fictional fast-food chain called Mickey’s (how close can you get without being sued?) that sells a jumbo burger called the "Big One." Don is sent to Cody, Wyoming, to visit Mickey’s meat supplier and sniff out the truth. But in Linklater’s curiously comatose take on Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction best-seller, the truth doesn’t set anyone free.
Writer Schlosser spent two years visiting ranches, interviewing fast-food employees and standing ankle-deep in blood on the "kill floor" of a meat-packing plant. He produced a comprehensive, persuasive exposé of what goes into the tasty fries and burgers that we eat. He even helped write the screenplay for the movie with Linklater. So why does the movie fall flat?
The timing, after all, should have been perfect. Documentaries such as Fahrenheit 911, Super-Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth have created an appetite for public inquiry, a dissatisfaction with politics and corporate greed. Yet Fast Food Nation  the movie  fails to muster a coherent argument against anything. It takes forever to go nowhere, and never delivers that knockout punch. Sure, we see teens stuck in dead-end McJobs; we see Mexican illegal immigrants smuggled into the US to work dangerous, soul-crushing shifts in the meat-packing industry; we see college kids reluctant to become eco-activists because they fear the all-pervasive Patriot Act; but the whole movie wallows in defeat and hopelessness, which the book did not.
This, despite the politically-conscious stars who signed on to work with Linklater, such as Kinnear, Bruce Willis, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke. And this despite Linklater’s proven record as a "maverick" filmmaker who can go from Dazed and Confused to Before Sunset and back to A Scanner Darkly, all in one career.
The mistake seems to be trying to impose a narrative thread on Schlosser’s engrossing book, which takes us from fast food kitchens to classrooms, from New Jersey labs that concoct the "smell" of sizzling burgers to hospitals where kids perish of e-coli infection. A documentary would have served this material much better. Here’s the blurb on the back of the Fast Food Nation DVD: "This is a story of postwar America. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast-food industry has triggered homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our land, widened the chasm between rich and poor, and fueled an epidemic of obesity."
This paragraph neatly sums up Schlosser’s arguments, but none of this comes through clearly in Linklater’s film. Perhaps the problem was how to get across those "big" but not particularly cinematic concepts  like the idea that more interstate highways in the 1950s led to more and more "rest stops" and fast food joints along the way, and that this concept has expanded into suburbia, cities and everywhere else: "fast" food for people too busy to think about what they’re eating. Not very easy to visualize, is it?
But Morgan Spurlock managed it in Super-Size Me. His barrage of arguments paralleled Schlosser’s book, if not in depth, at least in scope. And it was highly entertaining.
Maybe Linklater thought a "human" story would get the message across better. Thus the film tracks Mexican illegal aliens Raul and Sylvia (the sympathetic Catalina Sandino Moreno from Maria Full of Grace), as they take dangerous and demoralizing jobs at the Cody meat-packing plant. Sylvia’s friend screws the supervisor to get ahead, and Sylvia herself is forced to perform sexually for the same guy after her boyfriend suffers an industrial accident. To its credit, the Schlosser/Linklater script touches on concerns not covered in the book, such as the employee use of methamphetamine to "keep up" with the meat production line. That same drug use  and the employers’ strategy of keeping worker hours below 40 hours to avoid paying health benefits  results in high employee turnover in an industry that cares little for human lives.
At least one character  Kristofferson’s aged rancher  hits the mark as a straight-talking cowboy who exposes the unfeeling "machinery" behind the whole fast-food industry. He confides that cow manure gets into meat "every day" because unskilled workers forced to meet strict production deadlines slice into not just meat, but intestines  resulting in fecal contamination as the poop spills out. But a turn by Willis as a slimy meat purchaser for Mickey’s rings smarmy and false, though he does get in one good line ("Everybody has to eat a little shit in life").
Then you have Amber (Ashley Johnson), a fresh-faced fast-food employee, and her slacker buddies, trying to decide what to do with their lives. Amber later hooks up with some college eco-activists, including Avril Lavigne, whose big move is a night maneuver to free some cattle. (How Bless the Beasts and the Children can you get? And what the hell is Avril Lavigne doing in this movie?)
If the movie does have a useful function, it is to open some viewers’ eyes to the health dangers of the industry, and maybe get them to read Schlosser. It may be asking too much to expect this generation to read a 400-page nonfiction account of greedy corporate practices. Linklater serves up a fast-food version of an excellent eight-course meal of a book, but this is perhaps unavoidable in translating any book to the screen, one supposes.
The real money shot comes at the end, when Linklater takes us down onto the "kill floor" of the plant to witness the slaughter of cattle. This is actual footage, and one wonders how Linklater got clearance to film the hideous ritual. Closely recalling the description in the book, we see hapless cattle march down a chute, only to be struck in the heads with steel bolt guns; still alive, they’re hoisted up in the air on hooks and chains; the workers then descend with chainsaws and knives, slicing the meat away while the animals, still alive, twitch and jerk. We see troughs full of fat, gristle and blood, and cow heads in stainless steel trays, their faceless eyes staring back at us. It’s a scene from Hell, and it speaks more loudly than anything else in the movie about what’s wrong with the industry.
And it just might make you into a vegetarian.
Writer Schlosser spent two years visiting ranches, interviewing fast-food employees and standing ankle-deep in blood on the "kill floor" of a meat-packing plant. He produced a comprehensive, persuasive exposé of what goes into the tasty fries and burgers that we eat. He even helped write the screenplay for the movie with Linklater. So why does the movie fall flat?
The timing, after all, should have been perfect. Documentaries such as Fahrenheit 911, Super-Size Me and An Inconvenient Truth have created an appetite for public inquiry, a dissatisfaction with politics and corporate greed. Yet Fast Food Nation  the movie  fails to muster a coherent argument against anything. It takes forever to go nowhere, and never delivers that knockout punch. Sure, we see teens stuck in dead-end McJobs; we see Mexican illegal immigrants smuggled into the US to work dangerous, soul-crushing shifts in the meat-packing industry; we see college kids reluctant to become eco-activists because they fear the all-pervasive Patriot Act; but the whole movie wallows in defeat and hopelessness, which the book did not.
This, despite the politically-conscious stars who signed on to work with Linklater, such as Kinnear, Bruce Willis, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke. And this despite Linklater’s proven record as a "maverick" filmmaker who can go from Dazed and Confused to Before Sunset and back to A Scanner Darkly, all in one career.
The mistake seems to be trying to impose a narrative thread on Schlosser’s engrossing book, which takes us from fast food kitchens to classrooms, from New Jersey labs that concoct the "smell" of sizzling burgers to hospitals where kids perish of e-coli infection. A documentary would have served this material much better. Here’s the blurb on the back of the Fast Food Nation DVD: "This is a story of postwar America. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast-food industry has triggered homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our land, widened the chasm between rich and poor, and fueled an epidemic of obesity."
This paragraph neatly sums up Schlosser’s arguments, but none of this comes through clearly in Linklater’s film. Perhaps the problem was how to get across those "big" but not particularly cinematic concepts  like the idea that more interstate highways in the 1950s led to more and more "rest stops" and fast food joints along the way, and that this concept has expanded into suburbia, cities and everywhere else: "fast" food for people too busy to think about what they’re eating. Not very easy to visualize, is it?
But Morgan Spurlock managed it in Super-Size Me. His barrage of arguments paralleled Schlosser’s book, if not in depth, at least in scope. And it was highly entertaining.
Maybe Linklater thought a "human" story would get the message across better. Thus the film tracks Mexican illegal aliens Raul and Sylvia (the sympathetic Catalina Sandino Moreno from Maria Full of Grace), as they take dangerous and demoralizing jobs at the Cody meat-packing plant. Sylvia’s friend screws the supervisor to get ahead, and Sylvia herself is forced to perform sexually for the same guy after her boyfriend suffers an industrial accident. To its credit, the Schlosser/Linklater script touches on concerns not covered in the book, such as the employee use of methamphetamine to "keep up" with the meat production line. That same drug use  and the employers’ strategy of keeping worker hours below 40 hours to avoid paying health benefits  results in high employee turnover in an industry that cares little for human lives.
At least one character  Kristofferson’s aged rancher  hits the mark as a straight-talking cowboy who exposes the unfeeling "machinery" behind the whole fast-food industry. He confides that cow manure gets into meat "every day" because unskilled workers forced to meet strict production deadlines slice into not just meat, but intestines  resulting in fecal contamination as the poop spills out. But a turn by Willis as a slimy meat purchaser for Mickey’s rings smarmy and false, though he does get in one good line ("Everybody has to eat a little shit in life").
Then you have Amber (Ashley Johnson), a fresh-faced fast-food employee, and her slacker buddies, trying to decide what to do with their lives. Amber later hooks up with some college eco-activists, including Avril Lavigne, whose big move is a night maneuver to free some cattle. (How Bless the Beasts and the Children can you get? And what the hell is Avril Lavigne doing in this movie?)
If the movie does have a useful function, it is to open some viewers’ eyes to the health dangers of the industry, and maybe get them to read Schlosser. It may be asking too much to expect this generation to read a 400-page nonfiction account of greedy corporate practices. Linklater serves up a fast-food version of an excellent eight-course meal of a book, but this is perhaps unavoidable in translating any book to the screen, one supposes.
The real money shot comes at the end, when Linklater takes us down onto the "kill floor" of the plant to witness the slaughter of cattle. This is actual footage, and one wonders how Linklater got clearance to film the hideous ritual. Closely recalling the description in the book, we see hapless cattle march down a chute, only to be struck in the heads with steel bolt guns; still alive, they’re hoisted up in the air on hooks and chains; the workers then descend with chainsaws and knives, slicing the meat away while the animals, still alive, twitch and jerk. We see troughs full of fat, gristle and blood, and cow heads in stainless steel trays, their faceless eyes staring back at us. It’s a scene from Hell, and it speaks more loudly than anything else in the movie about what’s wrong with the industry.
And it just might make you into a vegetarian.
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