Fast Food Nation: B

It's a strange experience, watching an artistically gifted writer or director hobble themselves in search of higher art. I saw it in Sophia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (some mistook her under-reaching for apathy) as well as in James Ivory's Howards End (although that could have just as easily been my spark of romanticism being smothered) and most recently in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. These three films are all solid, if mis-guided, efforts and almost all of them fail thematically and ultimately it ruins their lasting impact on an auidence. Just as I could never get behind the Lisbon daughters or Emma Thompson marrying Anthony Hopkins, I can't seem to fall for the starved souls of Linklater's latest project. Most of his common elements are present again - hyper-articulate characters, humanist perspectives, shout-worthy acting - but his intentions with the movie encounter a major roadblock over and over, and one that Linklater, always an absurdly talented filmmaker, refuses to remove - his film's theme.

This seems a simple problem from the outset; after all, Fast Food Nation is adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Schlosser of the same name that delved into the slimy business of McDonald's and the like (plus Schlosser helped adapt his own material). And yet Linklater, inter-cutting the movie over three stories, doesn't so much grab hold of Schlosser's muck-racking reigns and run with them as he meanders, stopping to smell some roses occasionally and every once in awhile, giving a shout of eloquent indignation.

This is a grave error on his part, as the stories he instead leaves us with aren't all too compelling...or deep. The first - illegals working in a packaging plant - has grace notes of observant tragedy and a seriously powerful cast but lacks true dramatic arc while the second - a "Mickey's" exec (Greg Kinnear) is sent on assignment to see who let poop slip into the patties - ends far too abruptly for my tastes. And the third - a Linklater specialty of dead-end people philosophizing on daily life - though occasionally tough-minded and clever, seems more shallow than sublime.

It may seem at this point why it is I liked the film at all (as indeed I did). The answer has something to do with the actors at work - no true film conissuer can deny the swooning qualities of Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Catalina Sandina Moreno, Bruce Willis, and Luiz Guzman among others all working together - as well as with the eventual realization that Fast Food Nation may not be the most well-organized film (or the most poignant and well-shaped) but it evokes through its stories and plot-marker characters a bitter image of capitalist America that is hard to shake off. The sytematically depressing, as well as sadly logical, endings of his film are mere symptoms of his argument - here presented in step-by-step storytelling complete with the occasional tasty factiod and some groovy performances - that greed is not only overwhelming an industry, that of fast food, but the people involved with it.

I love most of Linklater's work; his dreamy-romantic verbal fireworks are just the thing I need after a long string of Ghost Rider's. But regardless of my status as a true devotee, I can't deny that there is a dour, grueling, confusing clash at the center of Nation that left me as much fascinated as it did frustrated.