Fast Food Nation

How, exactly, does one adapt a muckraking nonfiction best seller like Eric Schlosser’s Big Mac attack Fast Food Nation into a film? You could turn it into a PBS-friendly documentary, or go the first-person-crusader route (like Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me). Or, if you’re director/indie-cinema godhead Richard Linklater, you jettison the journalistic format and turn the exposé of Junk Food Inc. into a fictional Altman-esque ensemble piece. It’s a gamble, but in Linklater’s hands, the leap of faith pays off. Names have been changed to protect the guilty — the main offender isn’t McDonald’s but Mickey’s, home of the “Big One” — yet the book’s sense of outrage has survived the translation.

Set up as a Traffic for the Happy Meal–hating set, the film juggles several interwoven narrative threads. A marketing executive (Greg Kinnear, at his most smug) is sent to Mickey’s distribution hub in Colorado to investigate why there’s been so much darned fecal matter showing up in the franchise’s food. Meanwhile, at the town’s meatpacking plant, a new recruit (Wilmer Valderrama) gets schooled in the ways of the slaughterhouse. His girlfriend (Catalina Sandino Moreno) turns a blind eye, at least until her sister takes up with the factory’s speed-freak foreman (Bobby Cannavale). Finally, there’s an everyteen (Ashley Johnson) who jockeys the counter at the burger joint and slowly finds herself developing a conscience.

Multi-lead-character movies live or die by how well a filmmaker can handle the various moving parts, and luckily, mosaic storytelling has long been one of Linklater’s strengths (see Slacker, Dazed and Confused). Though the movie has his signature rambling pace, it’s still designed to connect actions with consequences: Illegal immigrants are herded in for underpaid grunt work, mass-produced meat products are sold by minimum-wage workers, and both endeavors fund the summer homes of white­collar execs several states over. Yet Linklater isn’t trying to give us a civics lesson so much as connect the dots between the corporate world, the class war and those cheeseburgers you wolfed down at lunch. Schlosser’s compulsively readable polemic argued that fast food isn’t healthy; the movie holds those truths to be self-evident and instead goes after a bigger picture of cultural rot. In Bush’s America, you’re either cattle too dumb to leave the pen, processed patties on the assembly line or just another animal on the killing floor.

The written word is a key component in two other exceptional films, not as source material but as stepping-off points for the narratives themselves. Stranger Than Fiction introduces its hero, hapless tax collector Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), in the same way that thousands of literary creations have: An omniscient narrator informs us of Crick’s tics, quirks and dashed hopes as he goes about his humdrum life. So far, so nineteenth century. Then suddenly, the character stops short and demands to know who’s saying all these things about his life; he too can hear the dulcet female voice detailing his every move, and down the rabbit hole we go. The conceit quickly becomes an Adaptation-lite tale of existential absurdism as Crick searches for the author pulling the strings and what her ominous “Little did he know … ” means for his future.

The whole exercise might be twee and insufferable were it not for director Marc Forster’s graceful handling of the comic twists and requisite life lessons. Forget gritty drama (Monster’s Ball) and sappy sentimentality (Finding Neverland); meta-textual farces may be Forster’s true métier. Ferrell also trades in his usual manic flailings for a calmer, smoother sense of confusion that complements his strengths, and this feels in every way like a Truman Show–style bid for more serious material. Let’s just hope he doesn’t ape Jim Carrey’s sanctimonious late-career choices, too.

And why just employ one “once upon a time” when you can use three? Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious The Fountain follows Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as they hopscotch through time (or do they? Discuss … ), repeating a thrice-told tragedy that reverberates around a doomed love. What binds the past and present is a mythical fountain of youth and an unpublished novel about the conquistador who discovered it. To say that Aronofsky’s film owes a serious debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris is to belabor the obvious, but there’s so much interesting intellectual grist on the nature of grieving that it comes close to making the hallucinatory Frank Frazetta imagery and exceeded grasp bearable. Flawed but memorable, Aronofsky’s eye-popping, if head-scratching, sermon will resonate long after you’ve finished flipping through its pages.