In honor of the November 7 release of Paste Movies Editor Michael Dunaway’s documentary 21 Years: Richard Linklater (in which Paste is the media partner), we’re going through the indie master’s entire oeuvre in order, film by amazing film.
Declaring Fast Food Nation Richard Linklater’s “most visceral film” is a bit of an understatement—it immediately lunges, teeth first, for the jugular, and cares so little for subtlety that there’s a smash cut between Greg Kinnear’s fast food chain Marketing VP considering an enormous industrial cattle ranch, and Luis Guzman’s shady coyote shuffling immigrants from a van (going so far as to refer to one of them by number). Considering the horrifyingly disgusting (and disgustingly horrifying—this really can’t be overstated—non-fiction source of its story, approaching the material with any measure of subtlety was probably never an option.
Adapted as a fictional narrative from his own bestselling non-fiction exposé, Eric Schlosser’s screenplay touches on nearly all of his book’s bigger themes of cause-and-effect, while wringing out a great deal of fatalistic humor on the topic. (Kinnear is ideally cast as the corporate go-to guy learning far more than he ever wanted to know about the product he shills for.) On its surface, the project seemed a strange fit for Linklater—a filmmaker synonymous with a narrative-free structure—until it’s discovered that the narrative follows three major threads, each with its own unique political agenda tied into the plot. Besides the thread of Kinnear’s character, there’s that of Mexican immigrants Raul (Wilmer Valderrama), Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Coco (Ana Claudia Talancón) paying for the privilege of smuggling themselves into the United States, only to be pressed into the service of the meatpacker/slaughterhouse giant that supplies tainted beef to Kinnear’s national burger chain employer, Mickey’s. (Subtlety’s already off the table, remember?) And then there’s Amber (a wonderfully earnest Ashley Johnson), who’s just trying to help her mom (Patricia Arquette) pay some bills by balancing success in high school with her part-time, minimum wage job at Mickey’s.