Fast Food Nation

First let me acknowledge that Richard Linklater is a hero of mine, and his release of this film in the same year as A Scanner Darkly puts him in the same category of versatile virtuosity as Michael Winterbottom (with Tristram Shandy and The Road to Guantanamo to his credit last year) -- able to balance quirky literary adaptations with engaged docudrama. Here Linklater and Eric Schlosser adapt the latter’s muckracking book about industrial food production into a different sort of illustrated lecture from An Inconvenient Truth, more in line with the far-out conversations that have been Linklater’s trademark from Slackers through Waking Life to the absolute classic Before Sunrise/Before Sunset. They interweave wisps of story, in a flat-footed but effective way -- bringing together the putrid realities of meat processing, with illegal Mexican immigrants who work the slaughterhouse and disaffected American teenagers who sling the burgers, along with assorted others either caught up in, or greasing, the food machine, including the cattle themselves. Made fast on a low budget, the film has a certain drabness, dramatically and visually, that is compensated by the cogent points made by a succession of characters in striking cameos by the likes of Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis. What story there is, is framed perfectly in the adorable visage of Catalina Sandino Moreno (indelibly Maria Full of Grace.) Among many others, two characters stand out, Greg Kinnear as a burger business executive dawning to the truth but surpressing his conscience, and Ashley Johnson as a perky but engaged teen who finds out about the poop in the patties she’s dispensing. In the end the human victims stand aside for the bovine, in documentary footage that is as salutary as it is gut-churning. While its stomach may be flopping, this film has its heart and its brain in the right place, making many salient connections amongst the various liabilities of the way we eat here and now. (2006, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-64.)