Richard Linklater In Way Over His Head

The films we lazily call "bad" -- and I do not excuse myself from this -- are usually films that, annoying or stupefying as they may be, present strong points of interest, often such that we may completely change our minds on re-exposure to them. I remember lambasting Leos Carax's Pola X back in 2000, for example, but I still remember it ; it's like no other film ever made, and surely that counts for something? All cineastes recall Roger Ebert spearing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny as the "worst film" ever shown at Cannes, although he completely recanted his criticism after seeing Gallo's re-cut and final version (films are sometimes rushed to Cannes in less-than-absolute form). I doubt that Roger or anyone squawked particularly when Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation was shown in competition at Cannes in 2003, because it is not memorably "bad" but rather, truly lame and forgettable. That is the greater aesthetic sin by a long shot. Trust me, Fast Food Nation is a much worse film than, say, Plan 9 from Outer Space -- much, much worse. It doesn't achieve what it seems to set out to do, and it has no especial reason to exist in the first place.

"Adapting" a non-fiction book that has no storyline as a fictional feature is a dicey business, and usually amounts to no more than purchasing the book's title for its recognition value (as Woody Allen was quite forthright about doing with Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex...But Were Afraid to Ask). Linklater apparently thought that he could turn Eric Schlosser's popular expose Fast Food Nation into an Altman-esque, multi-character panorama of how the fast food industry touches on multiple points of American life. You could do that, I suppose, although the danger of preachiness (not avoided in the end result here) is such that I think I would advise any fiction film-maker to steer clear; better just to enlist Michael Moore to make a polemical documentary. (I like Michael Moore; that's what he's for, and he has a very entertaining way of being self-righteous.) The screenplay that Linklater and Schlosser devised is simply a disaster, with characters appearing out of nowhere and disappearing just as fast, major plot-lines dropping in mid-stream or petering into nothingness, and the big gross finale, out of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle and Georges Franju's documentary film The Blood of the Beasts, an anti-climactic and lazy "pay-off." Linklater doesn't come within a million miles of Sinclair's and Franju's ferocity -- it's as if we should be morally appalled because cow innards look icky. These city kids, I'm tellin' ya...

I hold no brief against Linklater's work in general -- I like Before Sunrise, I like Waking Life; I take him on a film by film basis. But he simply hasn't got the technique of a Paul Thomas Anderson or a David O. Russell, that would enable him pull an effort like Fast Food Nation off. The film shouldn't have been at Cannes.

POSTSCRIPT: I've got nothing against the actors in Fast Food Nation, either; they do their best, and I was partly drawn to the film because I'll watch Greg Kinnear in anything. Today happens to be Kinnear's 46th birthday, so Happy Birthday, Greg! You are the best quirky leading man out there.