Movie Review: Fast Food Nation

I'll start by saying that I haven't read the book that this movie was (apparently loosely) based on. Having seen documentaries on the fast food industry and mega-corporate culture before this, I went in expecting a film that exposed a lot of shocking secrets (well, "secrets" in as much as we probably ignore a lot of things that we're really aware of at some visceral level because it's easy to forget about bad things if you don't see them on a daily basis.)

Instead what came on the screen was a somewhat haphazard and rambling series of interconnected stories, telling the tale of various parts of a fictionalized fast food restaurant. We start with the story of a corporate higher-up (Greg Kinnear) who is sent to investigate reports of problems with contamination at his chain's meat supplier. We then cut to the story of some illegal immigrants crossing a desolate border from Mexico and getting taken to various parts of the country to find work. At this point the movie showed a lot of promise and expectation in terms of giving an important message about how our daily choices can affect many people in different ways.

However, from here we cut to an odd story about a high school girl (Ashley Johnson) working at the register of one of this chain's restaurants, who is dissatisfied with her low-pay dead-end work. Her story was by far the weakest link in the movie, and distracts greatly from the main point about how low prices lead to poor labor conditions beyond the sight of the consumer. It's this which leads to both economic disaster and environmental disaster as companies look to cut as many corners as they can to make an extra dime, be it by relaxing safety standards, paying sub-living-wages, or by ignoring health standards.

The movie jumps from story to story, with no solid resolution in many cases. The issue of poor labor practices with the illegal immigrants is glossed over, with only brief mention made to the lack of reliable health care, low relative pay, poor training & safety standards, and inability to report problems for fear of deportation that these workers face. Likewise, Greg Kinnear's character decides to do the right thing and report to his boss about the problems with the meat packing plant, but by some inexplicable bit of storytelling the person with connections to the plant essentially blackmails him (well, technically his boss, but strangely enough this also jeopardizes his job despite having just successfully developed a huge money-making product for the company.)

As mentioned earlier, by far the weakest part of the storyline follows Ashley Johnson's character, who suffers from a severe infestation of general white-trash-small-town-ism. Her mom (a very scary-looking Patricia Arquette) is basically a 40-going-on-16 skank. She's the prototypical beautiful-yet-mysteriously-unpopular girl at her high school. She hates her job and wants to "do good" and gets caught up with a bunch of the local college greenies, and things progress from there. Strangely, in a movie that's apparently trying to tell lots of sad moralistic tales about how people get forced to conform and fall into roles, she manages to do everything against the grain, yet gets off scot-free at the end.

In summary, you'd be better off reading The Jungle (meet the new century, same as the old century), read the book version of Fast Food Nation (which Kristin tells me is much more focused on the activist aspect of the woes barely touched on in the movie version), or visit your local meatpacking plant. This doesn't do any of them proper justice.

Rating: 6 out of 10 Big Macs.