“The Founder”: A Fast-Food Visionary on Shaky Moral Ground

What were the consequences of the founding of McDonald’s? The problem with “The Founder,” John Lee Hancock’s vigorous but blinkered drama about Ray Kroc’s expansion of the company from a single hamburger stand into a national behemoth, is that it never asks. The movie remains resolutely active, never pausing to examine the effects of fast food’s sudden ubiquity on the national diet, the environment, the economy, or national psychology. It’s an inside-business movie, and it tells the story of the business with a wealth of fascinating—and appalling—details. But it offers no sense of the wider implications of the spread of the franchise, no sense of what it has meant to the world, and no sense of what it means to the characters in the story—not even to Kroc himself.